Apollo Global Management and Blackstone are working to bring additional investors into a roughly $36 billion debt financing deal tied to Anthropic's AI infrastructure expansion, according to Bloomberg. The deal would rank among the largest private credit transactions ever assembled.
Structured around a special-purpose vehicle, the deal would use the borrowed funds to acquire Google $GOOGL's custom tensor processing units — known as TPUs — and lease them back to Anthropic for deployment at data centers across New York, Texas, Louisiana, and Indiana, according to Bloomberg. The leasing arrangement lets Anthropic take on the computing capacity it needs while keeping the associated debt off its own books entirely.
Broadcom $AVGO, which helps Google develop the TPUs, is providing a residual value support agreement on the largest portions of the transaction, according to Bloomberg. Should Anthropic default on its lease obligations and a chip resale fail to cover what is owed, Broadcom is on the hook to make the A1 and A2 noteholders whole. Bloomberg reported the debt is divided into approximately $6 billion of A1 notes, $25 billion of A2 notes, and $4.5 billion of B notes, with those figures still subject to revision before closing.
Rather than holding the entire position, both Apollo and Blackstone intend to distribute pieces of the debt to outside investors, according to Reuters. Order books are open this week ahead of an anticipated closing next week, though the transaction has not yet been finalized and details remain fluid.
Rather than releasing capital all at once, the deal is structured so that draws occur in stages tied to chip deliveries and the start of Anthropic's lease agreements, according to Bloomberg.
Anthropic raised $65 billion at a $965 billion post-money valuation annoucned Thursday, surpassing rival OpenAI's valuation. Both Anthropic and OpenAI are eyeing potential initial public offerings as early as this year.