Analysis
Anthropic is negotiating a $60 billion chip-financing package called Project North Star that would have Blackstone funds anchor part of the deal at yields above 10%, according to a TokenPost report citing the Financial Times. The package would fund Anthropic's access to roughly 1.5 gigawatts of custom Google TPUs over five years -- compute the company needs to keep pace with OpenAI and Google's own frontier-model buildouts, without putting the full cost on its own balance sheet or diluting equity holders to finance it.
How The Deal Is Structured
- The financing isn't a single loan -- it's structured in tranches:
- Junior (subordinated) tranche — $18B total: backed by Anthropic's chip-lease payments over five years, paying yields above 10%, StockMoguls reported. Blackstone funds would take roughly half of this slice, with the rest syndicated to other investors.
- Senior secured tranche — the package's remainder: expected to be bank-led, with Broadcom providing residual-value support, the kind of backstop that makes lenders comfortable financing hardware that could otherwise lose value fast if AI demand cools.
“Anthropic's own earlier chip financing this year, Project Big Sky, priced its junior debt at 8.5%.”
Junior debt is the riskier piece -- it gets paid after senior lenders in a default, and Blackstone's commitment within it works out to roughly $9B -- which is why it carries the higher yield.
That junior-tranche pricing is the real story. Anthropic's own earlier chip financing this year, Project Big Sky, priced its junior debt at 8.5%. A jump from 8.5% to above 10% in the same calendar year is a roughly 150 basis-point repricing of risk on the same company's debt in a matter of months. Anthropic received a credit rating one notch below investment grade from KBRA in June 2026, and the new junior debt is expected to receive a similar assessment -- meaning rating agencies already treat this debt as sub-investment-grade before a dollar changes hands.
Anthropic isn't alone in financing AI infrastructure this way. CoreWeave's 9.625% notes due 2032 touched a roughly 15% yield this month as bondholders priced in doubt about its $52 billion in combined obligations -- a stress test Pulse has covered as a sign the debt-financed side of the AI buildout is being repriced downward across the sector, not just at one company. Anthropic's proposed 10%+ yield sits between CoreWeave's distressed 15% and its own 8.5% from earlier this year -- a middle point that still marks materially higher borrowing costs than six months ago.
The counterweight here is real: this is a proposed package, not a signed deal, and terms can still change before Blackstone or any other lender commits capital. Anthropic is also pursuing this debt alongside, not instead of, an IPO that could value the company near $2 trillion -- meaning the company is simultaneously trying to convince public-market investors it's worth trillions in equity while paying double-digit yields to borrow against the infrastructure that equity story depends on.
What to watch: if Project North Star closes near the terms reported here, it becomes a pricing benchmark for every other AI lab financing chip leases with debt instead of equity -- and a reference point for how much more expensive that debt has gotten since the start of 2026.
