Anthropic Offers Blackstone 10%+ Yield to Finance $9B Chip Deal, FT Reports

Anthropic is offering Blackstone a yield of more than 10% to finance its latest chip deal, the Financial Times reported Friday, in a sign of just how expensive the AI industry's hunger for computing power has become.

According to the report, funds managed by Blackstone would invest $9 billion in debt backed by Anthropic's lease payments on the chips over five years. The financing is tied to Anthropic's newest chip purchase, people familiar with the matter said, and Reuters — which carried the FT report — said it could not immediately verify it.

A double-digit yield is a striking price for an AI lab to pay. It suggests lenders now want a serious premium for funding AI infrastructure — even from Anthropic, one of the world's most valuable AI companies and OpenAI's chief rival.

Anthropic's appetite for computing power has been growing at a pace that has surprised even seasoned investors. The company has been signing data center deals at a blistering rate, with aggregate leases reportedly passing 15 gigawatts of capacity and commitments worth hundreds of billions of dollars.

That spending is the price of staying competitive. Training and running frontier AI models requires enormous clusters of specialized chips, and every major lab is racing to lock in supply. For Anthropic, compute is both its biggest expense and its biggest constraint.

The Blackstone arrangement shows how the AI boom is increasingly financed with debt, not just equity from venture funds and tech giants — and at rates that reflect real nervousness about how long the build-out can continue.

Blackstone has become one of the most aggressive financiers of the AI build-out, backing data center projects across Asia and joining a $5 billion term loan for Alphabet's self-driving unit Waymo.

For Blackstone's credit business, a yield above 10% on debt backed by five years of contracted lease payments is familiar territory: long-dated, cash-flowing assets with a creditworthy counterparty. For Anthropic, it is a way to get chips now without diluting equity holders ahead of a possible public listing.

The structure is telling. Securing the debt against lease payments — rather than Anthropic's balance sheet alone — mirrors how airlines and shipping companies finance their fleets: the asset's cash flows secure the loan.

The report lands as investors scrutinize the AI industry's mounting debts. This week, shares and bonds of cloud provider CoreWeave slid on borrowing-cost worries, and the yield on one of its bonds briefly surged past 16%.

Anthropic has been preparing for a public listing that investors have discussed at valuations as high as $1.5 trillion. Every financing it signs in the meantime — and the price it pays — will be read as a signal of how the market values AI's future cash flows.

Neither Anthropic nor Blackstone has publicly commented on the FT report. If the deal goes through, it will rank among the largest debt financings ever arranged for AI compute — and a marker of what the intelligence age actually costs.