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...