Apollo, Blackstone arrange $36bn debt deal for Anthropic

TL;DR:

  • Private-credit giants Apollo and Blackstone are reportedly bringing in investors for around $36bn (about £28bn) of debt tied to Anthropic’s AI infrastructure expansion, Bloomberg reported.
  • The debt would fund purchases of Google tensor processing units (TPUs), which Anthropic would then lease; Broadcom, which co-develops the chips, is backstopping the largest tranches.
  • The financing lands the same day as Anthropic’s $965bn equity valuation, exposing how much borrowed money now underpins the frontier-AI compute build-out.

A day after Anthropic confirmed a $965bn equity valuation, reporting surfaced on the debt side of the same story. Apollo Global Management and Blackstone are working to syndicate roughly $36bn of debt financing tied to Anthropic’s infrastructure plans, according to Bloomberg, with investors asked to submit orders this week and the deal expected to close as early as next week.

Why debt, and why now

The structure is unusual enough to warrant attention. The borrowed funds would buy custom Google chips known as TPUs, which Anthropic would lease rather than own outright — a financing route that keeps hardware off the balance sheet while securing scarce compute. Broadcom, which helps Google design the chips, is reportedly backstopping payments on the largest portions, layering a chipmaker’s credit behind the deal.

The terms remain fluid, and Apollo, Blackstone, Anthropic, Google and Broadcom all declined to comment. Apollo and Blackstone are said to plan to retain significant portions while selling down the rest — the hallmark of the private-credit playbook that has increasingly financed AI’s capital demands as the sums outgrow conventional venture funding.

Looking forward

For UK readers tracking the AI-investment cycle, the debt deal is the more revealing half of Thursday’s news. Equity rounds capture headlines, but layering tens of billions in leverage onto a pre-IPO company — secured against rapidly depreciating chips — is the kind of financial engineering that draws scrutiny when growth assumptions are tested. With Anthropic eyeing a public listing this year, how this debt is priced and absorbed will be an early read on whether credit markets share the equity market’s enthusiasm for frontier AI.

Share this article