Blackstone Plans to Raise at Least $36 Billion in Debt for Anthropic for Google Custom Chip Compute

Tradingkey - Blackstone (BX) is in preliminary discussions with investors to raise another massive debt financing package, potentially worth at least $36 billion, for Anthropic to use Google (GOOGL) chips.

People familiar with the matter said that the financing amount, structure, and whether Blackstone will ultimately lead the deal are still under discussion, and the plan could be adjusted. If completed at the current size, the deal would surpass the $35 billion debt financing arranged by Apollo and Blackstone about two months ago for Anthropic to lease Google's custom chips, which is already one of the largest transactions in the private credit market.

Behind this is the growing appetite of AI companies for computing power. Anthropic previously planned, with Google's support, to lease high-performance chips in five data centers; Google is not only an early investor in Anthropic but has also been continuously increasing its equity stake, and is now beginning to support its data center financing, tying the two sides ever closer in their capital and computing cooperation.

As news of the new financing emerges, Anthropic has just confidentially filed for a U.S. IPO, hoping to debut on the capital markets ahead of rival OpenAI. As Silicon Valley races to expand AI infrastructure, tech companies are pushing various financing tools in the credit market to their limits, and Wall Street is having to design more complex debt structures to meet this demand.

However, market concerns over the return on AI investment are also heating up, and some tech companies have recently had to pay higher interest rates for new financing.