The Financial Times ran two pieces on Anthropic’s debt on October 16, and together they paint an awkward picture. Both rest on sources and documents the FT has seen; Reuters and others picked the story up without confirming it independently.
$60 billion for 1.5 gigawatts of TPUs
The package is called Project North Star and is meant to finance roughly 1.5 gigawatts of Google’s TPUs. It has two layers. About $42 billion of senior debt is guaranteed by Broadcom, which builds the chips with Google. Below that sits $18 billion of junior debt.
Half of that junior tranche, $9 billion, is earmarked for Blackstone-managed funds. The offer is a 10% coupon, and issue discounts and fees push the actual return higher. Comparably rated borrowers pay around 7% in public bond markets. The debt is secured against the lease payments Anthropic will make for the chips over five years. The other $9 billion is expected to go to other investors in the coming months, possibly at lower yields. Once drawn down in 2027, the paper could trade in the 144A market.
For comparison: four months ago Anthropic raised about $4.4 billion through Project Big Sky at 8.5%. The price went up, not down.
BB+ since June, public only this week
The second FT piece supplies the reason. Kroll Bond Rating Agency rated Anthropic BB+ in June, the top rung of junk and one step below investment grade. The rating was assigned before Apollo’s $35 billion financing that same month, and it only became public now. The new junior paper is expected to land in similar territory.
Blackstone declined to comment. Anthropic did not immediately respond.
Expensive money sits badly with the plan
Anthropic wants investment grade, because it would cut borrowing costs for good. A double-digit coupon on junior debt points the other way. Paying 10% where similarly rated houses pay 7% is a premium for complexity, duration risk, or simply for the size of the ask.
It lands in a week when the valuation is already being argued over. I wrote yesterday about the IPO expectation being trimmed to $1.5 trillion. The numbers belong together: a company paying double digits for chip debt is borrowing compute against growth it has not booked yet.
What interests me most is the structure. Anthropic does not guarantee the senior layer—Broadcom does, the supplier. The risk moves to the party earning on the sale. Chains like that work as long as demand holds, and they are the first thing people look at when it does not.