Anthropic Pays Blackstone 10 Percent to Borrow $60 Billion for Google TPUs as AI Debt Gets Expensive

Anthropic is assembling the largest chip-financing arrangement on record, and the interest rate attached to the riskiest slice tells the story of a credit market that has stopped giving AI the benefit of the doubt. According to a weekend report by the Financial Times, the San Francisco lab is advancing a debt package of roughly $60 billion — internally dubbed Project North Star — to fund the purchase of about 1.5 gigawatts of Google's custom TPU processors. To get it done, Anthropic is offering Blackstone-managed funds a coupon of 10 percent or higher on the junior portion of the debt.

That pricing is not incidental. Borrowers with comparable credit profiles pay yields of roughly 7 percent in the public high-yield market, according to the ICE BofA BB index cited in the report. Blackstone is expected to commit about $9 billion, half of the planned $18 billion junior tranche, with the remainder to be marketed to a wider set of investors in the coming months — possibly at lower yields, the report said. The senior portion, about $42 billion, carries a residual-value guarantee from Broadcom, which co-develops the TPU chips with Google. Anthropic's chip lease payments over five years will service the borrowing.

The cost of money is climbing fast. In June, Anthropic closed the Project Big Sky chip financing — a package of roughly $35 billion that included about $4.4 billion of junior debt at a reported 8.5 percent. Four months later, the equivalent money costs 10 percent at the coupon, and more after issuance discounts and fees. KBRA rated Anthropic BB+, one notch below investment grade, in June, and the junior debt in the new package is expected to receive a similar assessment. Anthropic reportedly wants an investment-grade rating to bring future borrowing costs down, something it expects to achieve after a public listing; the new securities could trade in the institutional 144A market after the financing is drawn down in 2027.

Anthropic is, on its own numbers, a profitable company scaling into this debt. It recently reported third-quarter revenue of $16.8 billion and said it has posted two consecutive quarters of adjusted profitability — company-reported figures that have not been independently audited. But the broader market for AI-infrastructure credit has turned sharply more skeptical. CoreWeave's shares and bonds slumped this week as investors questioned its roughly $50 billion debt load; the company expects a net loss of about $2.13 billion this year against planned capital spending of $35 billion to $39 billion.

The repricing is showing up everywhere. JPMorgan and Goldman Sachs priced a $5 billion leveraged loan for AI cloud startup Volta on October 15 at 6.5 percentage points over benchmark, at 95 cents on the dollar — a yield above 11 percent. About $1.3 billion of it covers data-center fees and $3.7 billion buys roughly 36,000 NVIDIA GPUs. The banks kept only $1.3 billion on their books, and the loan includes prepayment penalties that compensate lenders if Anthropic-style borrowers refinance early. Lenders are plainly pricing for the exit.

Downstream, the tap is closing. Australia's Permian withdrew an IPO that would have raised about A$5 billion — the country's second-largest listing — in October after investors balked at its debt and valuation. In the UK, Nscale has signed long-term AI capacity contracts worth more than $100 billion with Microsoft and Anthropic, but has yet to raise the money to build the data centers behind them. If operators like these slow their GPU purchases, the demand shock travels straight to NVIDIA and to the HBM memory suppliers — Samsung and SK hynix — that feed it.

Anthropic's listing plans add a political wrinkle. New York City Comptroller Mark Levine, who oversees more than $325 billion in pension assets, wrote to CEO Dario Amodei this week urging the company to pause its IPO until it "fully and transparently" addresses AI safety and governance concerns, arguing the safety accord with the White House is insufficient. Speaking on Bloomberg Television on Friday, Levine warned that a serious safety incident after listing would hammer the stock — and noted that index inclusion would give New York's retirement funds exposure either way.

The significance of Project North Star is less its size than its price. Even a lab that says it is profitable, with a valuation north of $300 billion and revenue growing at triple digits, is paying double-digit coupons for silicon. The junior tranche still looking for buyers will be the real-time referendum on how much risk the private-credit market will absorb for AI compute — and at 10 percent and climbing, the market is saying: more than before, but not for free.