Anthropic's next batch of compute will have to be borrowed at an interest rate above 10% a year. On October 16, 2026, the Financial Times reported, citing people familiar with the negotiations, that Anthropic is raising a debt package of roughly $60 billion and has offered Blackstone a coupon above 10%; Reuters followed up on the story on October 17. The money is not for buildings or acquisitions. It buys access to Google's TPU chips: Anthropic wants to secure the compute first, backed by five years of lease payments.
The $60 billion is split into two layers
The package, internally called "Project North Star" and arranged by Broadcom, is structured in two tiers. The upper tier is about $42 billion of Class A senior secured debt, led by banks, which ranks first in repayment. Below it sits about $18 billion of Class B junior debt. Blackstone-managed funds would put in half of that junior tranche, $9 billion, with the rest syndicated to other investors. Junior debt gets paid later and absorbs losses first, which is why it commands the highest return: Blackstone has been offered a coupon above 10%, with total returns higher still once issuance discounts and fees are counted, while similarly rated borrowers typically pay around 7% in the public bond market.
According to Reuters' summary of the FT report, the $42 billion senior loan covers only about a third of the $125.2 billion Anthropic has committed under its five-year Google TPU lease, with the capacity expected to come online starting in 2027. That is also why this deal is only a beginning: the lease commitment is far larger than the financing package, so more money will have to follow. The debt instruments could also reportedly be converted into Anthropic shares.
Broadcom sells the chips and arranges the loan, and Anthropic flagged the risk itself
The most awkward part of the deal is Broadcom's dual role: it takes part in designing and supplying Google's TPUs while also arranging the financing. Anthropic has already written this into its own IPO prospectus as a risk factor, citing "potential conflicts of interest" from Broadcom acting as both vendor and lender. The same filing warns that triggering certain payment or performance defaults could accelerate a material portion of the lease obligations while cutting off access to the $42 billion credit line. In other words, the chips, the loan and the consequences of default are bound into a single chain; if one link fails, the cost is not as simple as cancelling a purchase order.
This is not Anthropic's first financing of this kind for compute. In June, Broadcom, Apollo and Blackstone had already formed a partnership that raised $35 billion, aiming to finance more than 20 gigawatts of AI compute by 2028. The $60 billion package is a larger step down the same road.
The price says more than the size
The status needs stating plainly: this is still a negotiation reported by the Financial Times through unnamed sources. Reuters said it could not immediately verify the report, Anthropic has made no official announcement, and no completed transaction has been declared. So the confirmed information is not "how much was borrowed" but "at what price the market is willing to talk." A junior coupon above 10% shows that, in lenders' eyes, leasing compute for a frontier model company is not a low-risk, safe trade: however fast model revenue grows, whoever fronts the chip money has to believe the company can still pay its rent in five years.
For general readers, the point of the story is not the term sheet but how fast the Claudes of the next two years can expand. Compute supply is increasingly a business where the risk premium is paid first: whoever locks in more chips at a lower cost of capital gets more room to iterate models and cut prices, while stubbornly high financing costs will eventually pass through to API prices, enterprise contracts and product cadence. Two things are worth watching next: whether this financing actually closes, and whether the junior tranche's final coupon moves down from above 10% — that will be the market's most direct vote on the credit of frontier labs.
