Apollo and Blackstone Shopping $36 Billion Debt Deal to Supply Anthropic with Google TPUs
The private equity giants are seeking additional investors for what would be one of the largest AI infrastructure financing deals to date.
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Apollo Global Management and Blackstone are working to bring additional investors into a roughly $36 billion debt financing deal that would supply Anthropic with Google's custom tensor processing units.
That's $36 billion. With a B. For context, that's larger than the GDP of over 80 countries.
The deal structure is notable: the debt will be used to purchase Google's TPUs, which Anthropic will then lease, according to Bloomberg. It's essentially a massive equipment financing arrangement, the kind of thing you'd see for aircraft or shipping containers, except the equipment here is AI accelerators.
What does this tell us about AI compute economics?
The scale here is striking, but it's the structure that caught my attention. Anthropic isn't buying these chips outright. They're not even taking on the debt directly. Instead, Apollo and Blackstone are effectively becoming AI infrastructure landlords, purchasing hardware that Anthropic will lease.
From my time in hardware, I've seen this model before in industrial automation. When you need expensive equipment but want to preserve capital, you lease. But $36 billion worth of leased compute suggests something about Anthropic's cash position, or at least their preference for keeping that cash liquid for other purposes (like, say, actually training models).
The involvement of private equity giants also signals that traditional finance sees AI infrastructure as a bankable asset class. TPUs depreciate, sure, but apparently not fast enough to spook Apollo and Blackstone.
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