Apollo Global Management and Blackstone are working on a $36 billion debt deal for Anthropic, Bloomberg News reported, marking one of the largest private credit packages ever assembled around a single AI company. The financing would give Anthropic a non-dilutive funding line at a moment when compute, data center capacity, and chip supply have become the binding constraints on frontier model development. Reuters relayed the Bloomberg report without additional terms on rate, tenor, or collateral.
The structure puts two of the world's largest alternative asset managers on the same side of an AI balance sheet. Apollo and Blackstone have each been steering tens of billions of investor capital toward digital infrastructure debt over the past two years, and Anthropic is now among the marquee borrowers in that pipeline. A $36 billion facility, if completed at the reported size, would dwarf most syndicated loans extended to private technology companies.
Anthropic has been raising on both sides of the capital stack. The company recently closed a $65 billion equity round at a $965 billion valuation, a print that put it within striking distance of OpenAI's private mark. Layering debt on top lets Anthropic preserve that equity base while still funding the multi-gigawatt training and inference footprint its product roadmap requires.
Key facts
- 01Apollo and Blackstone are working on a $36 billion debt deal for Anthropic, according to Bloomberg News.
- 02The package would rank among the largest private credit financings tied to a single AI company.
- 03The deal follows Anthropic's $65 billion equity raise at a $965 billion valuation reported earlier this cycle.
- 04Debt financing lets Anthropic fund compute and data center buildout without further diluting equity holders.
The use of proceeds, while not detailed in the Bloomberg report, almost certainly points at infrastructure. Frontier labs are now signing multi-year compute commitments with hyperscalers and chip vendors that run into the tens of billions, and those commitments need to be financed somewhere. Debt against contracted revenue or chip collateral is the cleanest way to do it without selling more of the company.
For Apollo and Blackstone, the trade fits a pattern. Both firms have been originating large private credit deals against AI and data center assets, replacing the role investment banks played in earlier infrastructure cycles. Their insurance balance sheets and private credit funds give them the scale to underwrite single deals at the $10 billion-plus range that traditional bank syndicates struggle to clear.
The terms that matter — coupon, maturity, security package, covenants — were not disclosed in the initial report. Private credit deals at this size typically price several hundred basis points over benchmark rates and carry tight covenants tied to revenue and cash burn. Whether Anthropic accepts those terms or negotiates a looser structure given its growth profile will be the more interesting detail when the deal documents surface.
Anthropic's revenue trajectory gives lenders something to anchor against. The company has been reporting steep growth in API and enterprise subscription revenue through 2025 and 2026, with Claude adoption inside coding tools, customer support stacks, and large enterprise deployments. A debt deal of this size implies lenders are underwriting that revenue ramp continuing through the back half of the decade.
The risk side is straightforward. A $36 billion debt load is only servicable if Claude's market position holds against OpenAI, Google, xAI, and Meta, and if inference economics keep improving rather than compressing margins to zero. Neither Apollo nor Blackstone has publicly commented on the report, and Anthropic has not confirmed the financing. The deal, as described, has not closed.
Anthropic stacking $36 billion in debt on top of a $65 billion equity round is a signal about how the AI capital cycle is maturing. The frontier labs are now large enough, and predictable enough in their revenue, that private credit will fund their infrastructure the way it funds telecom towers and pipelines. That shifts the competitive question from who can raise the most equity to who can service the most debt — and it puts Anthropic squarely in the same financing category as the hyperscalers it rents compute from.
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