Banks arrange $22B chip loan connected to Blackstone and Alphabet in record AI infrastructure deal

Wall Street is now in the business of financing AI chips the way it once financed aircraft and oil rigs. A consortium of banks has arranged roughly $22 billion in debt connected to Blackstone and Alphabet as part of a broader $35 billion multi-tranche financing package, one of the largest private credit transactions ever assembled.

The deal, led by Apollo Global Management and Blackstone, is designed to fund Anthropic’s access to custom AI chips developed by Alphabet in partnership with Broadcom.

How the deal actually works

At the center of the transaction sits a special-purpose vehicle, essentially a standalone legal entity created for one job: buying Alphabet’s tensor processing units (TPUs) and leasing them back to Anthropic.

The SPV approach lets Anthropic scale its computing power without shouldering the full capital burden of purchasing chips outright. The initial target is 1 gigawatt of compute capacity, with ambitions to reach approximately 20 GW by 2028 through what’s being called the AI XPV platform.

The financing itself is sliced into several tranches, each carrying different risk profiles and pricing. The senior debt portion included approximately $6 billion in A1 notes priced at Treasuries plus 1%, a remarkably tight spread made possible in part by Broadcom’s credit support on the senior tranches. Around $24 billion was sold to asset-backed investors at a yield of 5.75%. Junior debt, which sits lower in the repayment hierarchy and therefore carries more risk, amounted to roughly $4.4 to $4.5 billion at an 8.5% interest rate, without the Broadcom backstop.

Morgan Stanley and Bank of America acted as placement agents, helping distribute the debt to institutional buyers. By July 2026, portions of that debt were already being traded in secondary markets.

Why chips became collateral

Broadcom’s role is particularly notable. The chipmaker’s credit support on the senior tranches helped compress spreads to levels typically reserved for investment-grade corporate borrowers. It’s a strategic play: Broadcom manufactures the chips in partnership with Alphabet, so backstopping the debt effectively guarantees demand for its own products.

The bigger picture for AI financing

Blackstone has reportedly discussed follow-on financing pitched at about $36 billion for additional Anthropic chip needs. If that materializes, the combined debt supporting Anthropic’s compute infrastructure would exceed $70 billion, a staggering figure for a company that remains privately held.

The $24 billion sold to asset-backed investors at 5.75% implies significant institutional appetite for AI-linked debt. A1 notes at Treasuries plus 1% is the kind of spread you’d see on debt backed by a Fortune 500 company. That confidence is partly structural, thanks to Broadcom’s backstop.