Anthropic Offers Blackstone 10%+ Yield in $9B Chip-Debt Deal

Anthropic has offered Blackstone a coupon above 10% to anchor the junior tier of a $60 billion debt package arranged by Broadcom, the Financial Times reported. Blackstone-managed funds would commit $9 billion of their own capital, half of an $18 billion Class B junior tranche, and syndicate the rest. A $42 billion Class A senior-secured tranche is led by banks.

The money underwrites Anthropic's five-year lease for Google tensor processing units. Per a Reuters writeup of the FT story, the $42 billion loan covers roughly one-third of the $125.2 billion Anthropic has committed under that lease, with 3.5 gigawatts of Google-TPU capacity expected to come online starting in 2027.

The pricing is the story. Blackstone has been offered a 10% coupon, with total returns exceeding that once issuance discounts and fees are counted, versus roughly 7% that similarly rated borrowers pay in public bond markets. The debt instruments could also be converted into Anthropic shares.

Anthropic itself flagged the structural awkwardness. Its prospectus points to "potential conflicts of interest" from Broadcom's dual role as vendor and lender, and warns that triggering certain payment or performance defaults could accelerate a material portion of its lease obligations while cutting off access to the $42 billion credit line.

Internally the package is called Project North Star, and it is explicitly a scale test: it would be the largest chip financing arrangement to date. The structure extends an AI XPV partnership that Broadcom, Apollo, and Blackstone struck in June, which already raised $35 billion with the stated aim of financing more than 20 gigawatts of AI compute by 2028. Anthropic's debt footprint has been building for months on our beat.