Apollo and Blackstone facilitate a $36 billion debt agreement to acquire Anthropic's chips.

      To understand the latest financing round for Anthropic, it’s crucial to pay attention to who isn’t taking on loans. Apollo Global Management and Blackstone are arranging about $36 billion in debt, but this loan won’t appear on Anthropic’s balance sheet. Instead, it will purchase chips that will then be leased back to them.

      According to Bloomberg, these two firms are bringing in additional investors this week, with a closing anticipated next week. The funds will flow through a special-purpose vehicle that purchases Google’s custom tensor processing units (TPUs) — which serve as an alternative to relying solely on Nvidia — and lease that hardware back to Anthropic for use in data centers located in New York, Texas, Louisiana, and Indiana.

      This marks one of the largest private credit transactions ever organized around the computing requirements of a single company, demonstrating effective financial engineering. By utilizing a leasing vehicle for the purchase, Anthropic can access the chips without directly incurring tens of billions in hardware debt, while the lenders benefit from an asset-backed arrangement rather than an unsecured investment in a company that is not yet profitable.

      A significant detail lies in the clauses attached to the senior tranches. Broadcom, which assists Google in creating the TPUs, is offering a residual-value support agreement on approximately $31 billion of the senior debt. In simpler terms, if Anthropic fails to make lease payments and the resale of the used chips is insufficient to cover the loan, Broadcom will handle the shortfall. This means a chipmaker is effectively underwriting the demand for its own products.

      Apollo and Blackstone plan to sell off part of the debt while retaining substantial portions themselves, a move that signals their vested interest and facilitates the progress of a deal this size through a syndicate. Blackstone has an existing relationship with the borrower, already holding about $1 billion in Anthropic equity and participating in a separate $1.5 billion joint venture to integrate Claude into private equity portfolio companies.

      The context for this financing is a competitive race in computing power that has significantly inflated Anthropic’s valuation, which would have seemed unrealistic a year ago. The company is raising funds at valuations exceeding $900 billion, and the chip financing arrangement is the tangible manifestation of that figure: the valuation signifies ambition, while the debt secures the silicon needed to realize that ambition.

      No parties involved have made official comments, and the terms may still change before the final agreement. However, the financing structure clearly illustrates how the costs associated with frontier AI are being shared. The model developer, cloud provider, chip designer, and private credit firms are all interconnected in this financing deal, each assuming a different portion of the risk associated with the growing demand for Claude and the machines purchased to fulfill it.