Anthropic TPU debt financing offers Blackstone 10% coupon

Anthropic TPU debt financing is about to get a lot bigger and a lot more expensive. The AI developer is offering Blackstone a yield above 10% as part of a $60 billion package to fund roughly 1.5 gigawatts of Google's tensor processing units, the Financial Times reported, in what Mint described as the largest chip-financing deal to date.

What happened

The package, known as Project North Star, has two layers. About $42 billion is senior debt with support from Broadcom, which works with Google on the chips. Below it sits $18 billion of junior debt, and Blackstone-managed funds are expected to take $9 billion of that, according to Mint.

Blackstone has been offered a 10% coupon, with total returns above that after issuance discounts and fees. The junior debt is backed by Anthropic's five-year chip lease payments, with the chips held through a special-purpose vehicle. The senior tranche would yield roughly 7%, Crypto Briefing reported. The terms had not been announced when people familiar with them described the package, and Broadcom declined to comment, AI Affairs reported. The remaining $9 billion of junior debt may be offered to other investors in the coming months, possibly at lower yields.

Similarly rated borrowers typically pay around 7% in public bond markets. KBRA rated Anthropic a notch below investment grade in June, and the junior notes are likely to land at a similar level.

Why it matters

The price of money is rising for AI. Four months ago Anthropic raised about $4.4 billion through Project Big Sky at 8.5%. In June it struck a $35 billion arrangement with Apollo and Blackstone for about 1 gigawatt of compute. Paying more now shows lenders want extra compensation as AI infrastructure spending balloons. For Blackstone, the trade is a yield well above the public high-yield market in exchange for sitting behind senior lenders to a company that has not yet listed, Crypto Briefing noted.

The scale is tied to commitments. A report on Anthropic's IPO filing put its five-year TPU lease commitment at $125.2 billion, AI Affairs said, so the senior loan alone would cover roughly a third. That links Anthropic TPU debt financing directly to Broadcom's chip business, where Anthropic is expected to become the largest design customer next year. In April, Anthropic widened its Google and Broadcom deal to cover several gigawatts of next-generation TPUs from 2027, and Broadcom's banking syndicate began gathering the $60 billion on Oct. 2, AI Affairs reported, citing Bloomberg.

Credit markets are already nervous about AI borrowers, as our coverage of CoreWeave's credit default swaps showed. A double-digit coupon for one of the strongest AI names sets a reference point for everyone else.

What's next

Banks must still syndicate the senior portion, and Blackstone is looking for partners on the rest of the junior slice. Anthropic wants an investment-grade rating to cut future costs, and a public listing would help. On Monday morning Polymarket traders priced an Anthropic IPO by Dec. 31 at roughly three in four, after debate over its valuation in our Anthropic IPO valuation report.

If terms hold, the Anthropic TPU debt financing would turn Google's custom chips into collateral for the biggest chip-financing deal reported so far.