Wall Street has taken to financing AI chips much the way it once financed aircraft and oil rigs. A consortium of banks has arranged roughly $22 billion in debt tied to Blackstone and Alphabet as part of a broader $35 billion multi-tranche financing package — one of the largest private credit transactions ever assembled. Private credit refers to debt arranged and placed outside the public bond markets and traditional bank-loan syndicates.

The deal, led by Apollo Global Management and Blackstone, is designed to fund Anthropic's access to custom AI chips developed by Alphabet in partnership with Broadcom.

How the Deal Works

At the center of the transaction sits a special-purpose vehicle (SPV) — a standalone legal entity created for a single job: buying Alphabet's tensor processing units (TPUs) and leasing them back to Anthropic. SPVs are a staple of asset-backed finance: the entity holds the chips and collects the lease payments, so lenders' claims are tied to that asset and its lease cash flows rather than to Anthropic's own balance sheet. The structure allows Anthropic to scale its computing power without shouldering the full capital burden of purchasing the chips outright.

The initial target is 1 gigawatt of compute capacity, with ambitions to reach approximately 20 GW by 2028 through what is being called the AI XPV platform.

The financing itself is sliced into several tranches, each carrying a different risk profile and pricing. The senior debt portion included approximately $6 billion in A1 notes priced at Treasuries plus 1% — a remarkably tight spread made possible in part by Broadcom's credit support on the senior tranches. Around $24 billion was sold to asset-backed investors at a yield of 5.75%. Junior debt, which sits lower in the repayment hierarchy and therefore carries more risk, amounted to roughly $4.4 to $4.5 billion at an 8.5% interest rate, without the Broadcom backstop.

Morgan Stanley and Bank of America acted as placement agents, helping distribute the debt to institutional buyers. By July 2026, portions of that debt were already being traded in secondary markets.

Why Chips Became Collateral

The heading is literal: the chips inside the SPV, and the lease income they generate from Anthropic, are what stand behind the debt — the same logic that lets lenders finance aircraft against the planes themselves.

Broadcom's role is particularly notable. The chipmaker's credit support on the senior tranches helped compress spreads to levels typically reserved for investment-grade corporate borrowers. It is also a strategic play: Broadcom manufactures the chips in partnership with Alphabet, so backstopping the debt effectively guarantees demand for its own products.

The Bigger Picture for AI Financing

Blackstone has reportedly discussed follow-on financing pitched at about $36 billion for additional Anthropic chip needs. If that materializes, the combined debt supporting Anthropic's compute infrastructure would exceed $70 billion — a staggering figure for a company that remains privately held.

The $24 billion placed with asset-backed investors at 5.75% points to significant institutional appetite for AI-linked debt, while A1 notes at Treasuries plus 1% carry the kind of spread typically seen on debt backed by a Fortune 500 company. That confidence is partly structural, thanks to Broadcom's backstop.

Two threads to follow from here: whether Blackstone reported $36 billion follow-on financing takes shape, and how the AI XPV platform progresses from its initial 1 gigawatt toward the roughly 20 GW targeted for 2028.

Source: CryptoBriefing