Private equity heavyweights Apollo Global Management and Blackstone are orchestrating a monumental $36 billion debt syndication to fuel Anthropic’s AI infrastructure expansion. This financing, potentially the largest private credit deal in history, will acquire custom tensor processing units from Google. Anthropic plans to lease these chips to power its Claude chatbot and related AI models, marking a significant escalation in the race for computing power.
The deal’s structure involves Apollo and Blackstone pooling capital from other investors while retaining substantial stakes. Broadcom, a key collaborator on Google’s TPU designs, is underwriting payments on the largest tranches, effectively using its financial strength to de-risk the investment. Investor orders are due this week, and the transaction may close as early as next week, though terms could still adjust.
For Anthropic, this deepens its capital strategy, building on previous equity raises and long-term compute contracts. In April, the company secured roughly 3.5 gigawatts of TPU capacity through an expanded Google and Broadcom partnership, with deployment starting in 2027 as part of a $50 billion domestic compute initiative. That same month, Anthropic raised $6.5 billion at a $965 billion valuation, surpassing OpenAI’s paper valuation as demand for Claude grows.
Anthropic’s revenue run rate has surged past $30 billion annually, more than tripling from $9 billion at the end of 2025. Its enterprise API market share climbed from 12% in 2023 to 32% by mid-2025, driven by large financial and industrial clients integrating Claude into production. This growth persists amid regulatory scrutiny: in April, U.S. Treasury officials convened major bank CEOs over cyber risks from Anthropic’s forthcoming Claude Mythos model, which internal tests showed could uncover vast software vulnerabilities.
Broadcom’s move to guarantee payments signals that AI hardware suppliers are morphing into structured finance partners. The chip firm is central to Google’s TPU roadmap and will support future chips Anthropic leases, including next-gen designs with custom memory bandwidth improvements. This Blackstone-Apollo deal is just one example of private equity’s aggressive push into AI infrastructure. Earlier this month, Anthropic partnered with Blackstone, Goldman Sachs, Apollo, and Hellman & Friedman on a $1.5 billion venture to deploy Claude across portfolio companies in healthcare, manufacturing, and other sectors. In crypto markets, this trend highlights how capital concentrates around dominant AI platforms, while tokenized AI projects struggle for attention.