The TPU Sale Now Comes With a Buyback, in a Bite

Alphabet’s quarterly filing now says out loud that a TPU sale can come with a buyback.

• Google Cloud product sales, in the filing’s own words, are primarily the sale of TPU systems.
• Some contracts let the buyer make Google repurchase the hardware and the embedded software at a pre-set price over a multi-year term.
• Where the buyer assigns those TPUs to another party and keeps the right to force the buyback, Alphabet accounts for the arrangement as a financial guarantee.
• Revenue backlog reached $567.7 billion at 30 September, $560.8 billion of it in Google Cloud and $16.8 billion from Crux AI, the Blackstone backed venture Alphabet supplies.
• Alphabet has committed up to $10 billion of data center and energy backstops behind that same venture.
• Purchases of property and equipment ran $131.95 billion in nine months against $63.6 billion a year earlier, while TPU system inventory rose from $2.4 billion to $13.3 billion.

The seller is now the buyer of last resort on its own silicon, and the same pattern already sits behind Broadcom’s Anthropic deal. Read the full analysis.