Apollo's $35B Anthropic Chip Debt Set to Begin Trading

The largest private credit deal ever assembled is about to start changing hands. Bloomberg reports that the $35 billion debt package Apollo and Blackstone put together to finance Anthropic's purchase of custom AI chips will begin trading in the coming months, with roughly $15 billion expected to be accessible to investors by early 2027.

The structure is worth walking through, because it is how the AI capex story is quietly being repackaged for the rest of the financial system. A special purpose vehicle buys TPU chips co-developed by Google and Broadcom, then leases the hardware to Anthropic. The debt sits in three tranches: a $6 billion senior A1 layer priced at Treasuries plus 100 basis points, a $24 billion A2 tranche carrying a 5.75% coupon, and $4.5 billion of Class B notes at 8.5%. Broadcom guarantees the residual value of the chips behind the A1 and A2 layers, meaning that if Anthropic ever misses lease payments and the TPUs sell for less than what is owed, Broadcom covers the shortfall for holders of the senior notes. The Class B holders sit outside that backstop.

The money will not arrive in one shot. According to the reporting, the transaction uses a delayed-draw format with roughly 16 separate releases over a little more than a year, tracking chip production. Apollo's Atlas SP Partners is putting up $800 million in equity to sit under the debt. The chips are earmarked for deployment at Fluidstack data center sites, expanding Anthropic's compute footprint by an initial gigawatt.

The honest caveat is that this is a first-of-its-kind price discovery moment. The residual value of custom silicon two or three years out is not a well-behaved variable, and the reporting does not name the insurers or banks taking down the syndicate, or explain how the mark-to-market on aging TPUs will actually work. If the paper clears cleanly, though, the template is obvious, and you will see it repeated for OpenAI, xAI and anyone else whose compute bill has outrun their equity story.