Anthropic Secures $35B Debt Deal for TPUs, Backstopped by Broadcom
Anthropic has closed a roughly $35 billion private debt package led by Apollo Global Management and Blackstone to purchase and lease Google's TPUs, with chip giant Broadcom guaranteeing the residual value of the senior portion — a structure that further establishes AI compute as a Wall Street "asset class."
The financing uses a special purpose vehicle (SPV) that buys Google's Tensor Processing Units (TPUs) and leases them to Anthropic. Lease payments serve as the source of debt repayment, and the debt is kept off Anthropic's balance sheet. Broadcom provided a residual value guarantee (backstop) on the senior tranche (the top portion, mainly around $31 billion), reinforcing it with investment-grade-equivalent creditworthiness. Syndication and pricing were completed in early June 2026, and the package was finalized at $35 billion, slightly adjusted from earlier reports of around $36 billion (Bloomberg, AIWeekly).
The deal reflects Anthropic's reliance on Google Cloud TPUs for training and inference of its Claude models. In October 2025, the company secured up to 1 million TPUs (over 1GW of capacity, expected online in 2026) in a deal worth "hundreds of billions of dollars" (CNBC, Anthropic). In April 2026, it further agreed with Google and Broadcom to add multi-gigawatt next-generation TPU capacity starting in 2027 (Anthropic), making this debt a financing move that deepens its dependence on Google TPUs. Around the same time, it also completed a roughly $65 billion Series H equity round at a $965 billion valuation, complementing its capital structure.
The debt is split into tranches by yield. The senior portion backed by Broadcom was priced at a lower rate, while the unguaranteed junior portion carries a relatively higher yield.
| Tranche | Size | Yield / Features |
|---|---|---|
| A1 notes | ~$6B | Bank syndicate, +100bps spread |
| A2 notes (senior) | ~$24-25B | ~5.75% coupon, Broadcom-backed |
| B notes (junior) | ~$4.5B | Around 8-9% |
The SPV purchases the TPUs on a delayed-delivery basis and allocates them to leases across four U.S. states. In the event of default, Broadcom's residual value guarantee covers any shortfall from reselling the chips (Reuters).
Anthropic has officially stated it has long valued TPUs' "strong price-performance and efficiency," and Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian has pointed to efficiency gains from years of TPU operation (Google Cloud). The company pursues a multi-chip strategy spanning Google TPUs, Amazon Trainium, and Nvidia GPUs, optimizing cost and performance per workload.
Among investors and infrastructure specialists, some welcome the SPV structure for enabling large-scale fundraising while protecting a startup's balance sheet, and view AI compute being woven into financial markets as a new asset class positively. Others, however, warn that the short 2-3 year useful life of TPUs creates a risk of underestimating depreciation, and question the transparency of off-balance-sheet debt. The package is centered more on financial structure than end-user adoption, symbolizing a trend in which AI infrastructure procurement increasingly resembles real estate and aircraft lease financing.