**Anthropic** has reportedly offered an annual yield of more than 10% in exchange for **Blackstone** serving as a key investor (anchor investor) in $9 billion of junior debt tied to its latest AI chip financing package. The deal is a striking illustration of how expensive it has become to secure AI computing capacity (compute).
Key points:
The Blackstone fund is investing $9 billion in bonds backed by chip lease payments over a five-year term.
Borrowers with similar credit ratings typically pay interest rates of around 7% in the public corporate bond market.
Dubbed “Project North Star,” this deal is the largest chip financing transaction ever.
Anthropic’s chip financing structure
According to several people familiar with the matter, funds managed by Blackstone are in talks to acquire half of the $18 billion junior tranche—$9 billion—which will be issued against lease payments Anthropic is expected to make over the next five years. Reuters was the first to report the news.
The headline coupon offered to Blackstone is around 10%, and the effective yield is expected to rise into the low double digits after accounting for the issuance discount and various fees. Blackstone declined to comment, while Anthropic did not immediately respond. Further details have since been reported by international financial media outlets.
The package has been named “Project North Star.” Under the deal structure, approximately 1.5 GW (gigawatts) of **Google** tensor processing units (TPUs) will be placed in a special-purpose vehicle (SPV) and leased to Anthropic, with the lease-payment cash flows backing the debt. According to industry publications, the overall package also includes $42 billion in senior bonds guaranteed by **Broadcom**, while the remaining $9 billion in junior bonds could be sold to other institutional investors over the coming months. Those new investors may be offered somewhat lower yields than Blackstone.
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Blackstone’s yield premium
The deal’s most notable feature is its yield. In the current public corporate bond market, borrowers with credit ratings similar to Anthropic’s are said to typically pay interest rates of around 7%. In June, credit rating agency KBRA assigned Anthropic a rating one notch below investment grade. Anthropic aims to secure an upgrade to investment grade through further business growth and improved financial performance, which would significantly lower its borrowing costs going forward.
Borrowing costs have risen markedly even compared with a deal completed just four months ago. Anthropic raised about $4.4 billion in a similar transaction then, dubbed “Project Big Sky,” at an interest rate of around 8.5% per year. This time, the coupon has climbed to around 10%, despite the same company and a similar structure.
The package is also being described as record-breaking in scale. It is among the largest chip financing deals ever and is expected to serve as a test of how much AI-related debt investors are willing to take on, as massive capital continues to flow into AI infrastructure. At the same time, concerns are mounting that the burden of investment in data centers, power infrastructure, and other facilities is ballooning.
In a recent interview, Robert Leitao, managing partner at Rothschild & Co, warned of the risks, calling it “a highly concentrated transaction that is making an outsized bet on the revenue-generating capacity of two companies.” The debt could be effectively issued after 2027 and then traded among institutional investors in the secondary market.
Anthropic’s aggressive fundraising drive
The North Star negotiations build on a major deal Anthropic signed in June this year. At the time, **Apollo**, together with Blackstone, led a $35 billion package to expand Anthropic’s AI compute infrastructure by around 1 GW. Blackstone has published official materials on the deal. Working with Broadcom, the initiative aimed to build a platform to support more than 20 GW of AI computing infrastructure worldwide by 2028.
In early October, Bank of America, Citigroup, and **Morgan Stanley** began a large-scale syndication of the $42 billion senior tranche of the North Star package. The effort to distribute the massive infrastructure debt, backed by Broadcom’s guarantee, is testing both the risk appetite of major global banks and investor demand.
Meanwhile, according to Anthropic’s IPO filing, the company has entered into lease agreements totaling $125.2 billion to secure TPU capacity over the next five years. The information has also been reported by international technology and financial media. Anthropic is pursuing an IPO this year, and industry observers expect it to continue aggressively expanding its infrastructure after going public.
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