Apollo and Blackstone arrange $36B in debt for Anthropic AI chips

Apollo Global Management and Blackstone are arranging $36 billion in debt financing to purchase Google's custom TPU chips for Anthropic, in what would be one of the largest private credit transactions ever and the biggest chip-focused debt deal on record.

"This is a landmark transaction that demonstrates how private credit markets are stepping in to finance the massive capital requirements of AI infrastructure," a person familiar with the deal structure said.

The financing will fund the acquisition of Google's tensor processing units, with Broadcom — which helped Google develop the chip — guaranteeing most of the debt. Anthropic will then lease the chips for its AI operations. The company recently raised $65 billion at a post-money valuation of $965 billion, highlighting the scale of its ambitions.

The deal shows that AI's demand for compute is reshaping capital markets, with private credit giants displacing traditional bank lending for infrastructure financing. For Anthropic, the arrangement provides access to tens of billions in computing power without upfront capital expenditure, potentially accelerating its race against OpenAI and other rivals.

The $36 Billion Infrastructure Bet

The transaction marks a new frontier for private credit, a market that has grown to more than $1.5 trillion in assets as banks retreated from leveraged lending. Apollo and Blackstone, two of the largest alternative asset managers with a combined $2.5 trillion in assets under management, are using Broadcom's investment-grade credit rating to secure favorable terms on the debt.

Google's TPU chips, now in their fifth generation, compete directly with Nvidia's H100 and B200 graphics processing units. The TPU v5p delivers an estimated 459 teraflops of FP16 performance, compared with the H100's 990 teraflops, though Google's custom architecture offers advantages in power efficiency and integration with its cloud platform. Nvidia's data center revenue reached $47.5 billion in the most recent fiscal year, showing the scale of the market these chips address.

Investor Implications

For Broadcom, the guarantee represents a new revenue stream tied to AI infrastructure growth beyond its core semiconductor and software businesses. The company's shares have gained more than 40 percent over the past year as investors priced in AI-related demand, and the stock trades at roughly 30 times forward earnings.

Anthropic's aggressive compute procurement strategy puts it in a position to challenge OpenAI's dominance in large language models. The company's Claude models have scored competitively on key benchmarks including MMLU and HumanEval, while the additional compute capacity could accelerate development of next-generation systems. OpenAI has reportedly raised more than $20 billion in funding and secured similar compute commitments from Microsoft.

For Google, the deal locks in massive demand for its TPU platform, strengthening its cloud business against Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure. The arrangement also deepens Google's strategic relationship with Anthropic, in which it has already invested billions.

Apollo and Blackstone are expected to bring in additional investors to participate in the debt financing, which could close in the coming months. The deal's structure may serve as a template for future AI infrastructure financings, as companies across the industry seek alternatives to equity dilution for funding compute expansion.

This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice.