Old Tricks for New Silicon
Anthropic requires ungodly amounts of processing power to train Claude, but buying high-end silicon outright leaves a rather unsightly dent on a company's balance sheet.
Enter the financiers.
By parking the hardware inside an off-balance-sheet vehicle, Broadcom secures a mammoth order book, Anthropic enjoys cutting-edge compute without burning through its own cash reserves, and the accountants sleep soundly.
It is neat, tidy, and subtly precarious. A passenger jet or a toll bridge can produce cash flow for thirty years with routine maintenance. A high-end processor, by contrast, faces the brutal churn of rapid obsolescence. If newer, faster silicon renders today’s kit redundant in three years, who absorbs the wreckage?
The lenders, of course.