Apollo Global Management and Blackstone are orchestrating a $36 billion debt financing deal for AI startup Anthropic, according to Bloomberg News. The funds will be used to purchase custom tensor processing units (TPUs) from Google, which Anthropic will lease back to expand its AI infrastructure.
Broadcom, a key partner in developing the chips with Google, is backstopping payments on the largest portions of the transaction. Apollo and Blackstone plan to keep significant chunks of the debt while selling down the remainder to other investors.
This comes as Anthropic recently announced a massive $65 billion funding round at a $965 billion valuation, surpassing rival OpenAI. The company is racing to boost computing capacity for its popular Claude chatbot. Both Anthropic and OpenAI are reportedly eyeing potential IPOs as early as this year.