Key Takeaways:
Blackstone's $36 billion proposal would push Anthropic's private chip debt past $71 billion in two months.
Blackstone is sounding out investors on a debt package of at least $36 billion to finance Anthropic's lease of Google's custom AI chips, topping the record $35 billion facility arranged two months ago.
"Google has poured billions into Anthropic, Anthropic uses that money to rent chips from Google — but Google's billions aren't enough, so Anthropic is borrowing billions more from Blackstone," Ed Elson, a financial podcast host and analyst, said on social media.
The proposed financing would follow the blueprint of the $35 billion AI XPV Platform deal unveiled in June, a three-way partnership among Broadcom, Apollo and Blackstone's credit business that financed more than one gigawatt of Anthropic compute capacity across five data centers. Broadcom guaranteed the largest senior tranches, substituting its investment-grade credit for Anthropic's pre-IPO startup risk and unlocking participation from pension funds and insurers. Morgan Stanley advised on that transaction.
The new package arrives two months after Anthropic confidentially filed for a US initial public offering, seeking to list on Nasdaq as early as October and beat rival OpenAI to market. The company's estimated $19 billion annual compute bill — against $47 billion in annualized revenue, up roughly 30-fold from $1 billion at the end of 2024 — means the debt must keep stacking as a structural operating requirement rather than a one-time capital need.
The $36 billion proposal is expected to mirror the prior deal's architecture. A bankruptcy-remote special-purpose vehicle would borrow from investors and use the proceeds to buy Google's Ironwood tensor processing units, then lease compute capacity back to Anthropic, which pays rent rather than servicing debt directly. The tranche structure is expected to include roughly $6 billion in A1 notes, $25 billion in A2 notes and $4.5 billion in B notes, with Broadcom's residual value support covering the senior tranches if chip resale values fall short.
Placing tens of billions in TPU hardware on Anthropic's balance sheet would require equivalent equity capital, diluting shareholders and turning the lab into a hardware-leasing enterprise. The SPV keeps the chips off Anthropic's books — the balance sheet will show lease obligations, not $71 billion in chip debt, a distinction IPO investors will need to weigh when the S-1 becomes public.
Anthropic's compute expansion is not limited to Google. Per SemiAnalysis, the company signed a $10 billion compute agreement with Bitdeer and Volta Infra, a neocloud startup backed by Nvidia and founded by former Brookfield executives, driven by surging demand for Claude Code. The deal follows a $65 billion Series H equity raise in late May at a $965 billion post-money valuation — capital that funds operations and research, not hardware.
The broader AI debt market is absorbing this at scale. Morgan Stanley forecasts AI-related debt issuance approaching $570 billion in 2026, and Wall Street is designing ever more complex structures to meet demand. Yet stress is showing at the margins: CoreWeave's $2.6 billion delayed draw term loan was forced to widen its interest-rate spread by 100 to 125 basis points last week before investors committed. Whether that covenant pressure reaches a Broadcom-guaranteed Anthropic facility — which carries structural protections CoreWeave's deal lacks — remains to be seen.
Blackstone shares gained about 1.6 percent Tuesday as the talks surfaced. For Anthropic's eventual public investors, the arithmetic is the story: compute spend of roughly $19 billion a year, growing with model scale and inference volume, requires continuous financing. If the cadence holds — a new private credit facility every two months as compute tranches come online — the IPO will price a company that re-enters the debt market repeatedly as a structural requirement, not a one-time capital need.
This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice.
