Anthropic's $60B Chip Debt: Why Blackstone Gets 10%

Ten percent versus seven. That’s the number worth holding onto from the Financial Times report on Anthropic’s chip financing, which Livemint, TokenPost and others summarized on Saturday.

Anthropic is reportedly offering Blackstone a coupon of 10% to anchor part of a $60 billion package called Project North Star. Borrowers with a similar credit rating pay around 7% in the US public high-yield bond market. And 10% is only the stated rate. Livemint’s account of the FT story says Blackstone’s total return would be higher once issue discounts and fees are counted.

How the $60 billion is split

The money pays for roughly 1.5 gigawatts of Google’s custom TPU chips, which Anthropic would lease for five years. The lease payments are what back the debt.

Per Livemint, there are two layers. About $42 billion is senior debt guaranteed by Broadcom, which works with Google on the chips. The other $18 billion is junior debt, which gets paid after the senior lenders if something goes wrong, and that’s why it carries the higher rate. Blackstone-managed funds would take $9 billion of it. The other $9 billion is expected to be offered to other investors over the coming months, possibly at lower yields.

The sources don’t agree on one detail. AI Weekly, a newsletter that cites the FT and Reuters, says 3.5 gigawatts of TPU capacity comes online from 2027 under the wider lease. Livemint and TokenPost say 1.5 gigawatts for this deal. They may be describing different pieces, and I couldn’t read the FT original to settle it.

Why 10% is the story

Pricing tells you what lenders think. A senior loan that banks are syndicating is one thing. Junior debt that sits behind $42 billion of other claims is where the lenders get nervous, and they want paying for it.

Livemint adds some history. Anthropic’s earlier Project Big Sky financing raised about $4.4 billion at 8.5% four months ago. KBRA rated the company one notch below investment grade in June, and the new junior debt is expected to get a similar rating. So the cost of borrowing went up while the company’s IPO plans were moving ahead.

AI Weekly also reports that the debt could be convertible into Anthropic shares, and that Anthropic’s own prospectus flags “potential conflicts of interest” because Broadcom is both a chip supplier and a lender. That’s a single secondary source, so treat it as unconfirmed until the filing is checked. If it’s right, it’s a good reason for Blackstone to want the extra yield.

Where I land

I don’t read 10% as a sign Anthropic is in trouble. Fortune reported this week that Anthropic told investors its third-quarter revenue hit $16.8 billion. I covered the IPO filing’s loss figures in September, so the loss side is known too. A company with revenue like that can usually borrow.

What bothers me is the direction. AI labs are now signing five-year chip leases worth $125.2 billion (that’s the figure in Anthropic’s prospectus, as reported) and funding them with debt that costs more each time. The same week, CoreWeave’s bonds were yielding nearly 15% on October 14. Lenders are still willing, but they’re charging more.

The thing to watch is how fast that second $9 billion sells and at what rate. If it goes at 10% or close, private credit has accepted this kind of lease-backed AI debt. If the price has to widen, the market is telling Anthropic and everyone behind it that the cost of compute just got heavier. Neither Blackstone nor Anthropic commented in the reports I read.

Sources

The original Financial Times article is paywalled and I couldn’t open it, so the figures above come from these summaries of it.