The way to read the latest Anthropic financing is to notice who is not borrowing the money. Apollo Global Management and Blackstone are arranging roughly $36 billion of debt, but the loan does not sit on Anthropic’s balance sheet. It buys chips, and the chips get leased back.
The two firms are bringing additional investors into the deal this week, according to Bloomberg, with a close expected next week. The borrowed money flows through a special-purpose vehicle that buys Google’s custom tensor processing units, the TPUs that have become Anthropic’s alternative to a Nvidia-only diet, and then leases that hardware to Anthropic for use in data centres in New York, Texas, Louisiana and Indiana.
It is one of the largest private-credit transactions ever assembled around a single company’s compute needs, and the financial engineering is doing real work.
By routing the purchase through a leasing vehicle, Anthropic gets the chips without carrying tens of billions in hardware debt directly, and the lenders get an asset-backed structure rather than an unsecured bet on a company that does not yet turn a profit.
The most telling clause sits underneath the senior tranches. Broadcom, which helps Google build the TPUs, is providing a residual-value support agreement on roughly $31 billion of the senior debt.
In plain terms: if Anthropic stops paying its lease and the used chips do not fetch enough on resale to cover the loan, Broadcom absorbs the shortfall. A chipmaker is, in effect, underwriting the demand for its own chips.
Apollo and Blackstone intend to sell down part of the debt while keeping sizeable portions themselves, the kind of skin-in-the-game signal that helps move a deal of this size through a syndicate.
Blackstone is no stranger to the borrower. The firm already holds around $1 billion of Anthropic equity and is part of a separate $1.5bn joint venture to push Claude into private-equity portfolio companies.
The backdrop is an arms race in compute that has pushed Anthropic’s paper value to heights that would have read as absurd a year ago. The company has been raising at valuations above $900bn, and the chip-financing deal is the physical counterpart to that number: the valuation buys the ambition, the debt buys the silicon to make it real.
None of the parties has commented on the record, and the terms could still shift before close. What the structure makes plain is how the cost of frontier AI is being spread. The model developer, the cloud provider, the chip designer and the private-credit giants are now bound into a single financing, each holding a different slice of the risk that the demand for Claude keeps growing fast enough to pay for the machines being bought to serve it.
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