Anthropic has raised money this year at a pace almost no private company has matched, and most of it has not been equity. Bloomberg reported Tuesday that Blackstone has held early talks with investors to gauge appetite for a second debt package covering Anthropic's use of Google's custom chips, with one initial proposal set at a minimum of $36 billion.
That would exceed the $35 billion package Apollo Global Management and Blackstone assembled roughly two months ago for the same purpose, and it would take total borrowing tied to Anthropic's Google chip supply past $71 billion. Almost none of it would sit on Anthropic's balance sheet. Blackstone, Apollo, Anthropic and Google all declined to comment.
The phrase doing the work in Bloomberg's report is "a second mega debt package." The June deal was treated as a singular event, the largest private credit transaction ever assembled, sized against one specific expansion of computing capacity. A second package of comparable scale, sounded out weeks later, reframes it. This is not a one-time financing but a channel that stays open as long as Anthropic keeps adding chips.
The structure is worth spelling out because Anthropic is not the borrower. A separate company, created for the purpose and funded by lenders, buys the chips and rents them to Anthropic, and those rent payments are what repay the debt. The chips are tensor processing units, or TPUs, Google's in-house alternative to Nvidia's graphics processors. Keeping the hardware off Anthropic's books matters more than usual for a company preparing to sell shares to the public.
What the first $35 billion looked like
Apollo and Blackstone wrapped up that financing in June across three layers carrying different risk. Bloomberg reported $6 billion of senior notes priced 1% above Treasury yields, $24 billion at a 5.75% coupon, and $4.5 billion of subordinated notes at 8.5%. Broadcom, which helps Google build the TPUs, backstopped payments on the largest senior portions. Morgan Stanley advised Broadcom and helped arrange the deal. The chips are destined for five data centers.
Broadcom, Apollo and Blackstone set up a joint financing platform called AI XPV earlier this year to fund compute infrastructure for leading AI companies. The $35 billion deal was its first installment, which made a follow-on likely. The open question was how quickly, and how much.
Google's guarantees do the heavy lifting
Google is not lending money here. It is standing behind Anthropic's obligations. Alphabet's quarterly filing with the SEC put maximum potential exposure from its data-center payment backstops at $43.8 billion as of June 30, up from $16.9 billion at the end of 2025. Those guarantees are what let lenders underwrite an Anthropic lease at investment-grade pricing instead of startup pricing. Google was also one of Anthropic's earliest equity investors.
The pattern extends past chips. The Wall Street Journal reported on July 30 that Nexus Data Centers is in advanced talks to borrow about $15 billion for a Texas campus Anthropic will lease, with Google guaranteeing lease and power obligations in return for roughly 20% of the project. CNBC confirmed Morgan Stanley is leading that bank group. That borrowing is separate from the chip debt.
What is not settled
Nearly everything. The size, the structure, and even whether Blackstone ends up leading the financing are still under discussion and could change. There is no public pricing, no lender list and no timeline. The June deal is a useful caution on that point: it was shopped at $36 billion in May before landing at $35 billion.
Two risks sit underneath all of it. Nobody knows what a three-year-old custom AI chip is worth, because no fleet of them has aged that far or been resold at scale. And borrowing costs for AI-linked issuers have already started to reflect doubt, with some companies paying steep yields on recent deals as investors question whether the underlying investments will pay off.
Anthropic filed confidentially for a US listing and began lining up investor meetings in mid-July, aiming to reach public markets before OpenAI. Its last private valuation was $965 billion. That number is a claim about the future. The chip debt is a schedule of payments due regardless.