Apollo and Blackstone Sign a $35 Billion AI Chip Deal for Anthropic

On July 25, Apollo Global Management and Blackstone announced a $35 billion financing deal for Anthropic, the AI lab behind Claude. The two private credit giants created a special purpose vehicle, called AI XPV, to fund the purchase of thousands of Google-designed AI chips. The deal is now the largest private credit transaction ever made for AI infrastructure, showing how fast capital is flowing into the compute race.

The financing is split into several layers, called tranches, with different risk levels. About $30 billion sits in the senior tranche, the safest part of the loan. To make this safer, chip designer Broadcom offered a residual guarantee: if the chips lose value, Broadcom will buy them back at a pre-agreed price. This kind of guarantee is now common in the AI boom, because buyers want protection when spending tens of billions on new hardware.

The chips themselves are Google Tensor Processing Units, or TPUs, designed to train and run large AI models. Under the deal, Anthropic will not own the chips directly. Instead, the special purpose vehicle buys them, and then leases them to Anthropic and other model companies. This lease-back structure lets AI labs grow their compute without paying the full cost up front, and lets investors collect regular income from the leases.

For Apollo and Blackstone, the deal is a big bet that AI compute will become a stable, long-term asset class, like office buildings today. For the wider market, it shows that private credit funds are now willing to finance the full AI supply chain, from chip designers to model labs. Analysts say that if the deal performs well, more than one hundred billion dollars of similar financing could follow over the next two years, as demand for AI compute continues to outpace supply.