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.
