Anthropic’s fundraising through 2026 has accelerated to record levels, including a $35 billion package in June arranged by Apollo Global Management and Blackstone - the largest ever private credit transaction - to fund the AI lab’s use of Google-designed processing chips. This funded the expansion of its processing power across five different data centers in the United States.

Less than two months later, reports from Bloomberg suggest that Blackstone is pitching a “second mega debt package” of at least $36 billion.

Together with the June deal, this would raise Anthropic’s chip-related borrowing to over $71 billion. However, the majority of this would not appear on the company’s own balance sheet. Instead, the company’s creditors backed the creation of a separate entity that acquires Google’s Tensor Processing Unit (TPU) chips and then rents them to Anthropic.

This keeps Anthropic’s own balance sheet comparatively clear of liabilities at a time when it is reportedly exploring a public offering; the firm confidentially filed for an IPO on June 1, with its most recent private valuation coming in at $965 billion.

The AI XVP fundraising structure

Apollo and Blackstone partnered with Broadcom - itself a manufacturing partner for Google’s proprietary TPU chips - to create the financing platform AI XVP shortly before the first Anthropic deal. Its mission is to provide funding for frontier AI labs to acquire compute resources.

The first Anthropic deal spanned three different tranches, according to Bloomberg. The first - comprising $6 billion in senior notes priced at 1% above Treasuries - was allocated to a banking group; the second, $24 billion “priced at par with a 5.75% coupon,” was sold to a cohort of institutional investors; the third contained $4.5 billion of subordinated notes priced at 8.5%.

The highest-rate tranche, A3, was the only one not backed by a backstop from Broadcom.

This backstopped debt financing model is becoming increasingly common in the AI industry. Google’s credit-derivative backstops currently carry a maximum potential exposure of $43.8 billion, up over 150% from the end of 2025, according to parent company Alphabet’s quarterly filings. These relate to agreements the company has in place to backstop the lease and electricity payments on several new Anthropic data centers.

Most recently, the Wall Street Journal reported that Nexus Data Centers is seeking a $15 billion investment from major U.S. banks to fund a new Texas center for the frontier AI firm. Google is expected to receive a 20% stake in that project in return for its backing, as well as a commitment that the data center will be powered by its own TPU chips.

The terms of the new deal are not yet concrete

The specifics of Blackstone’s latest proposal are still under discussion; the final size may end up bigger than $36 billion, as this is only the minimum amount reportedly included in the first proposal. Talks are still in an early stage, with Bloomberg’s sources speaking under condition anonymity as they had no authorization to share any details.

Each of the firms connected to the deal declined to comment.