Apollo Global Management and Blackstone are arranging about $36 billion of debt for Anthropic’s compute needs without placing the loan on Anthropic’s balance sheet. The financing routes through a special-purpose vehicle that purchases Google’s custom tensor processing units and leases the hardware to Anthropic for data centers in New York, Texas, Louisiana, and Indiana. The structure creates an asset-backed arrangement for lenders rather than an unsecured bet on a company that has not yet turned a profit. A residual-value support agreement from Broadcom underpins roughly $31 billion of senior debt, absorbing shortfalls if lease payments stop and resale values are insufficient. Apollo and Blackstone plan to sell down parts of the debt while retaining large stakes.
"Apollo Global Management and Blackstone are arranging roughly $36 billion of debt, but the loan does not sit on Anthropic's balance sheet. It buys chips, and the chips get leased back. The borrowed money flows through a special-purpose vehicle that buys Google's custom tensor processing units, the TPUs that have become Anthropic's alternative to a Nvidia-only diet, and then leases that hardware to Anthropic for use in data centres in New York, Texas, Louisiana and Indiana."
"By routing the purchase through a leasing vehicle, Anthropic gets the chips without carrying tens of billions in hardware debt directly, and the lenders get an asset-backed structure rather than an unsecured bet on a company that does not yet turn a profit. The most telling clause sits underneath the senior tranches. Broadcom, which helps Google build the TPUs, is providing a residual-value support agreement on roughly $31 billion of the senior debt."
"In plain terms: if Anthropic stops paying its lease and the used chips do not fetch enough on resale to cover the loan, Broadcom absorbs the shortfall. A chipmaker is, in effect, underwriting the demand for its own chips. Apollo and Blackstone intend to sell down part of the debt while keeping sizeable portions themselves, the kind of skin-in-the-game signal that helps move a deal of this size through a syndicate."
"Blackstone is no stranger to the borrower. The firm already holds around $1 billion of Anthropic equity and is part of a separate $1.5bn joint venture to push Claude into private-equity portfolio companies. The backdrop is an arms race in compute that has pushed Anthr"
Read at TNW | Anthropic
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