The deal: a $60 billion package
According to the Financial Times on Friday, October 16, Anthropic is offering investment firm Blackstone an annual yield above 10% to finance its latest deal funding AI chips. Reuters reported the story on October 17.
The deal consists of a $60 billion debt package. It was arranged by chipmaker Broadcom, and the project is known internally under the codename "Project North Star". If confirmed, it would be the largest chip-financing deal in history.
Blackstone-managed funds will invest $9 billion of debt within the package. The debt is secured by Anthropic's five-year lease payments for chips. The information reached the Financial Times through sources familiar with the matter.
The essence of the deal is that Anthropic does not buy the chips outright — it leases them for five years, while investors lend against the stream of those lease payments. This structure lets technology companies keep enormous capital expenditures off the balance sheet, while promising investors secured returns with a predetermined payment schedule. Being secured by lease payments means the debt's repayment depends directly on Anthropic's regular contractual payments — investors rely precisely on this payment stream, not on a separate asset as collateral.
The Financial Times report came out on Friday, October 16, and immediately drew market attention: the scale of AI infrastructure financing is moving beyond the bounds of traditional corporate debt markets. The $60 billion package alone demonstrates a previously unseen scale — this is not a simple corporate bond issue, but a complex financial structure covering the entire chip supply chain.
How the tranches work
The package is split in two. Blackstone-managed funds will contribute $9 billion of their own capital — half of the $18 billion junior Class B tranche. In other words, Blackstone is putting its own funds' equity at risk, not borrowed money — an important signal of the investor's confidence in the deal.
The second part is the $42 billion senior-secured Class A tranche, led by a group of banks. The senior tranche is paid first relative to the junior tranche and is protected by additional collateral — so its yield is expected to be lower.
This hierarchy is a classic way of distributing risk: if payments are interrupted, senior tranche holders are paid in full first, while junior holders make do with what remains. That is why the junior tranche takes on higher risk and demands higher returns in exchange — the 10% coupon offered to Blackstone belongs to this tranche. The senior tranche, in return for lower risk, accepts lower but more reliable returns.
All funds will be directed to financing Anthropic's five-year lease agreement for Google tensor processing units (TPUs). In other words, the investors' $60 billion will ultimately be spent on Google chips: Anthropic leases the capacity, Broadcom arranges the deal and delivers the chips.
According to AI Weekly's analysis, the $42 billion senior debt covers roughly one third of Anthropic's $125.2 billion in total obligations under this lease. So this package — despite being $60 billion — closes only part of Anthropic's total obligations; the rest must be covered from other funding sources. The figure shows how enormous the company's need for computing power is.
Starting in 2027, 3.5 gigawatts of Google TPU capacity is expected to come online in stages. The gradual ramp-up confirms the deal's long-term nature: the financing is tied not to a one-time purchase but to an infrastructure plan that will expand over years.
"Anthropic is offering Blackstone an over-10% yield to finance the chip deal," the Financial Times wrote on October 16 (via Reuters).
Pricing: notably above market rates
The most remarkable aspect of the deal is the pricing. Blackstone has been offered a 10% coupon rate; including issuance discounts and fees, the total yield will be even higher.
To understand this, the mechanism needs unpacking. The coupon is the interest paid annually to the debt holder. But if debt instruments are issued at a price below par (an issuance discount), the investor receives the same interest payments from an instrument bought more cheaply — so their actual, effective yield exceeds 10%. Fees and additional payments also enter the overall calculation, which is why the final return comes out above the coupon rate.
For comparison: in the public bond market, borrowers with this credit rating pay roughly 7%. So the terms Anthropic is offering are nearly three percentage points above the market level — interpreted as a premium for the risk investors see. Although the debt is secured by lease payments, the five-year term, the structure's complexity, and uncertainty in the technology market are priced as additional risk — the gap between 7% and 10% is precisely the monetary expression of that risk.
The debt instruments may also later be converted into Anthropic shares. This provision gives Blackstone the chance to earn additional returns if the company's value rises. In practice this means the investor is simultaneously both a holder of high-yield debt and a potential participant in the company's future growth — such a "two-sided" structure is typical in high-risk deals. The conversion option gives the investor two-way protection: if things don't go to plan, the guaranteed interest payments as a debt holder remain; if the company's value surges, extra profit can be captured through conversion into shares.
Against this backdrop, Anthropic's market valuation is also growing: we covered the IPO plans and the $1.5 trillion valuation report on our site this week.
Conflict of interest and risks
In its prospectus, Anthropic itself flagged the deal's delicate aspect. The document notes a "potential conflict of interest" arising from Broadcom's participation in a single deal both as a chip supplier and as a lender.
The essence of this risk is the clash of roles. As a supplier, Broadcom influences chip prices, delivery timelines, and technical specifications; as a lender, it has an interest in the uninterrupted flow of payments. When both roles are combined in one company, its decisions may tilt toward one side of the deal — for instance, if delivery terms conflict with debt terms, which interest takes priority? The prospectus's open acknowledgment gives investors a chance to assess the risk in advance, but it does not eliminate the conflict itself.
Original news source: Reuters (citing the Financial Times).
