I would imagine Anthropic et al. are largely leasing land/buildings, so as the other commenter said… must be the server racks that are acting as collateral (if anything). Generally enterprise hardware depreciates very harshly. I’m used to paying $10 for Intel Xeons that once retailed for over $5,000. I expect to pick up some NVIDIA Blackwell 6000s for $100 each someday.

Yep, a friend recently told me that he remembers working somewhere that gave away old empty server racks - they were unnecessary, and expensive to store, so why keep them?

We are in odd times however - I for one am sitting on paper profits on the consumer gpu I bought 2 years ago. If anyone goes down before the supply side is fixed - the first to fall will probably be able to liquidate their gpus at a profit.