Ten banks are putting up $22 billion for Crux AI, the cloud venture jointly owned by Blackstone and Alphabet. The money buys tensor processing units, Google’s own AI chips. The collateral is the chips themselves plus Crux AI’s customer contracts. Bloomberg reports it citing people with knowledge of the matter.
Who Crux AI is
The company is new. It launched in September on $5 billion in equity from Google and Blackstone, and it sells TPU capacity as a neocloud — compute for rent, without the rest of a big cloud provider’s catalogue. The CEO is Benjamin Treynor Sloss, formerly a Google engineering vice president. Alan Duong joined as chief development officer, most recently vice president and head of data center engineering at Meta.
The plan: 500 megawatts in 2027, then scaling to two gigawatts. The build is mixed — powered shells, build-to-suits, colo blocks and first-party greenfield development.
How the loan is secured
The interesting part isn’t the number, it’s the structure. The debt is backed by the value of the TPUs and by the contracts Crux AI has signed with its customers. Chips as collateral assume somebody can price their resale value over the life of the loan — for hardware whose next generation shows up in roughly a year. And customer contracts as collateral are only as good as the customers.
This has become a pattern. Anthropic’s GPU deal with Rum Group ran to $13.7 billion, split into tranches with a warrant attached. Compute in this industry no longer gets paid for out of profits. It gets financed, and the chips are the land registry.
Why this matters for Anthropic
Crux AI wants to sell compute to AI labs. Claude already runs on Google Cloud among other places, and more TPU capacity on the market means the same thing for every buyer: more choice, better prices, less dependence on a single supplier.
The other reading is less comfortable. Google is standing up a second structure that rents out the same chips Google Cloud rents out — with outside capital, off its own balance sheet. Meta started doing this in July. Whoever makes the chips now earns twice: on the sale and on the rental. For the labs that’s convenient as long as the credit holds. Whether $22 billion secured with silicon still counts as conservative financing in five years won’t be settled by a press release.
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