Anthropic has offered investment firm Blackstone returns above 10 per cent to help finance a $60 billion purchase of artificial intelligence chips, the Financial Times reported on October 17. The proposed deal, called Project North Star, would fund about 1.5 gigawatts of Google’s custom tensor processing units — chips co-developed with Broadcom — and could become the largest chip financing arrangement on record.
The package splits into two layers with very different risk profiles. About $42 billion would come as senior secured loans, with Bank of America, Citigroup and Morgan Stanley syndicating and Broadcom providing support linked to the chips’ residual value. The remaining $18 billion is junior debt without Broadcom’s backing: Blackstone funds would provide $9 billion at a 10 per cent coupon — with discounts and fees lifting the total return above 10 per cent — while the other $9 billion would be offered to investors in the coming months, potentially at lower yields.
A test of lender appetite
The terms highlight how expensive AI infrastructure has become — and how cautious lenders have grown. Borrowers with similar credit profiles typically pay around 7 per cent in public bond markets, putting Anthropic’s offer about three percentage points above the benchmark. Anthropic had raised about $4.4 billion through a similar arrangement, Project Big Sky, just four months earlier at 8.5 per cent. The FT noted that underwriters may wait to market the junior debt broadly until after the startup’s planned IPO later this year.
The bigger picture
Anthropic’s IPO prospectus put its five-year TPU leasing commitment at $125.2 billion, and Blackstone already holds roughly $1 billion of Anthropic equity at a $350 billion valuation. The deal follows a separate August announcement in which Nvidia partnered with Blackstone and five other institutions to mobilise more than $500 billion for AI infrastructure. As one analyst put it, chipmakers are increasingly turning to structured finance to accelerate demand — placing themselves on both sides of the transaction as lender and supplier.
