Apollo and Blackstone Finalize Record $35B Debt Package to Fuel Anthropic’s AI Chip Expansion

Apollo Global Management and Blackstone have finalized one of the largest private credit transactions ever assembled — a roughly $35 billion debt financing package designed to purchase Google’s custom tensor processing units (TPUs) for Anthropic, the AI startup behind Claude. The deal represents a new model for funding the insatiable compute demands of frontier AI labs, with an intricate structure that keeps the debt off Anthropic’s balance sheet while binding chip designers, private credit giants, and the AI developer into a single financial ecosystem.

The Deal Structure: SPV, Lease, and Three Tranches

The borrowed money flows through a special-purpose vehicle (SPV) that buys Google’s TPUs and then leases the hardware to Anthropic for deployment across data centers in New York, Texas, Louisiana, and Indiana. By routing the purchase through a leasing vehicle, Anthropic gets access to cutting-edge chips without carrying tens of billions in hardware debt directly, while lenders get an asset-backed structure rather than an unsecured bet on a company that has yet to turn a profit.

Pricing details that emerged this week reveal the debt stack breaks into three distinct tranches:

• A1 Notes (~$6 billion): The most senior, investment-grade tranche, priced at approximately 1% over U.S. Treasuries. Fully covered by Broadcom’s residual-value support agreement.
• A2 Notes (~$24 billion): The largest senior tranche, carrying a 5.75% coupon. Also backed by Broadcom’s guarantee, giving it de facto investment-grade credit quality.
• B Tranche (~$4.5 billion): Subordinated notes yielding roughly 8.5%, carrying no Broadcom backstop — a purely speculative bet on Anthropic’s continued growth.

The funding will be drawn down in stages via a delayed-draw mechanism that aligns disbursements with the chip delivery schedule, with Apollo and Blackstone planning to syndicate portions of the debt while retaining significant positions themselves — a skin-in-the-game signal designed to move the deal through a demanding investor base.

Broadcom’s Pivotal Role: The Residual-Value Backstop

The most telling component of the deal sits beneath the senior tranches. Broadcom, which co-develops Google’s TPUs, is providing a residual-value support agreement covering roughly $31 billion of the senior debt. In plain terms: if Anthropic stops paying its lease and the used chips don’t fetch enough on resale to cover the loan, Broadcom absorbs the shortfall — covering 100% of the remaining amount for A1 and A2 holders.

A chipmaker is, in effect, underwriting the demand for its own chips. This structure elevates the credit quality of the A1 and A2 notes to investment-grade levels equivalent to Broadcom’s own rating, without directly impacting Broadcom’s balance sheet or credit profile. The B tranche holders, however, carry the residual risk with no such safety net — a structure reminiscent of the “Beignet bonds” Meta Platforms used for its Hyperion data center project in Louisiana, where Meta’s credit backing pushed bonds to trade at levels comparable to Meta’s own corporate debt.

Hock Tan’s Vision: 20+ Gigawatts by 2028

During Broadcom’s fiscal Q2 2026 earnings call, CEO Hock Tan unveiled what he called the “AI XPU platform” — a strategic vision to marry Broadcom’s chip technology with the deepest balance sheets in private credit to deliver compute at unprecedented scale.

“Our strategic vision is to bring together Broadcom’s leading technology and investor partners with the strongest balance sheets to deliver at scale sufficient compute capacity at the lowest cost and power for the leading AI frontier labs, including Anthropic and OpenAI,” Tan told investors. With Apollo and Blackstone now on board, Broadcom plans to deploy more than 20 gigawatts of compute capacity through 2028.

Broadcom’s AI semiconductor revenue hit $10.8 billion in Q2 — up 143% year-over-year — with bookings exceeding $30 billion against that $10.8 billion shipped. Tan described demand as “simply insatiable,” forecasting full-year 2026 AI semiconductor revenue of $56 billion and fiscal 2027 exceeding $100 billion.

Anthropic’s Meteoric Rise: $965B Valuation, IPO Filing

The chip-financing deal arrives against the backdrop of Anthropic’s staggering valuation growth. The company recently completed a $65 billion equity funding round at a $965 billion post-money valuation, surpassing OpenAI for the first time in corporate value. Annualized revenue has crossed $47 billion, and both Anthropic and OpenAI have filed confidentially for initial public offerings expected later this year.

Blackstone’s involvement runs deeper than the debt deal. The firm already holds approximately $1 billion in Anthropic equity and is part of a separate $1.5 billion joint venture to push Claude into private-equity portfolio companies — a multi-pronged bet that the demand for frontier AI models will continue its breakneck trajectory.

A New Financial Model for AI Infrastructure

To date, the market for AI chip financing has largely been built around Nvidia GPUs, with data center operators like CoreWeave raising massive amounts of capital using GPU-backed loans. This deal marks the first large-scale application of that same financial logic to Google’s TPU ecosystem — a signal that alternative chip architectures are becoming financeable assets, not just scarce technology.

The structure distributes risk across four distinct layers: the model developer (Anthropic) leases rather than owns, the cloud provider (Google) supplies the chip architecture, the chip designer (Broadcom) backstops residual value, and the private credit giants (Apollo, Blackstone) underwrite and syndicate the debt. Each party holds a different slice of the bet that demand for Claude keeps growing fast enough to pay for the machines being purchased to serve it.

If the deal lands cleanly — investor syndication is expected to close this week, with the transaction potentially completing next week — it won’t be the last of its kind. Compute is becoming the new collateral, and the companies that lock up stable chip supply first will not merely train larger models; they will set the pace for product releases, enterprise contracts, and platform reliability. In AI, the balance sheet is becoming just as important as the model.

What to Watch

The terms could still shift before close, and none of the parties has commented on the record. A key variable going forward is whether Broadcom maintains its investment-grade credit rating — the fundamental premise underpinning the entire transaction structure. Any change in that rating would have cascading effects on the credit quality of the A1 and A2 notes. Additionally, investors will be watching closely to see how Anthropic’s monetization progresses and whether its IPO, expected later this year, reinforces the equity story underpinning the chip lease.