Anthropic Will Pay Blackstone More Than 10% to Borrow for Chips. Your Credit Card Approves

There are two ways to tell whether a company is doing well. One is to look at its revenue. The other is to look at what lenders charge it. Anthropic, the maker of the Claude chatbot, has just given us a fresh look at the second.

According to the Financial Times, Anthropic is offering Blackstone a yield of more than 10% to help finance its latest batch of AI chips. The money sits inside a much bigger package, a roughly $60bn debt deal reported under the codename “Project North Star”, meant to pay for around 1.5 gigawatts of tensor processing units, the custom AI chips designed by Google.

How the deal is built

The structure looks like a layered cake, and the layers taste very different. Reporting on the deal describes a $42bn senior tranche, the safer slice that gets paid first, and an $18bn junior tranche, the riskier slice that gets paid later. Blackstone is expected to put about $9bn of its own funds into that junior slice and sell the rest on to other investors. Risk is why the yield is high. If you are last in line to be repaid, you want to be paid well for waiting.

The chips themselves would sit in a special-purpose vehicle, a separate company that owns the hardware and carries the debt. That lets Anthropic use the computing power without putting the whole loan directly onto its own balance sheet. It is a common trick in aircraft and property finance, and now it is a common trick in AI.

Reuters had already reported, from Anthropic’s IPO filing, that Broadcom agreed to lend the company up to $42bn for infrastructure, and that the loan could later convert into Anthropic shares. That facility could cover about a third of Anthropic’s $125.2bn five-year commitment to lease TPU computing capacity.

Why it matters

For most people, a 10% interest rate means a credit card bill they would rather not open. For a company preparing for one of the biggest stock market debuts in years, it is the price of speed. Borrowing lets Anthropic buy computing power now without selling more of itself to equity investors before it lists. The BBC has reported on the company courting investors ahead of that debut.

The trade-off is that debt has to be repaid whether the AI boom keeps booming or not. Lease payments for chips do not pause because token prices fall or a rival releases a cheaper model. That is exactly the worry some strategists have raised this week about AI spending in general: the technology can work brilliantly while the people who paid for the buildout still end up disappointed.

None of this means the deal is reckless. Lenders like Blackstone do their homework, and a high yield is partly what makes the risk worth taking for them. But it is a useful reminder that the AI race is not only a contest of clever models. It is also a contest of who can borrow the most, the fastest, at a rate they can live with.

The Snark take

Every chatbot answer you get is quietly sitting on top of a very large loan. The next time Claude tells you it is “happy to help”, remember that somebody, somewhere, is charging double digits for the privilege.

This is commentary, not investment advice. Figures are as reported by the outlets linked below.