Anthropic stacks $71B in chip-lease debt via special purpose vehicles

What happened

Anthropic secured $71 billion in chip-lease debt through special purpose vehicles (SPVs) over roughly 60 days. In a $35 billion deal closed in June 2026, arranged by Apollo Global Management and Blackstone Credit and Insurance, an SPV acquires Google's tensor processing units and leases them back to Anthropic. A second preliminary $36 billion deal was reported in early August 2026, with similar structure and deployment targeted at data centers across New York, Texas, Louisiana, and Indiana.

Why it matters

By using SPVs, Anthropic keeps massive hardware deployments off its corporate balance sheet, avoiding the drag of hardware depreciation on its primary financial statements while funding compute spending estimated at approximately $45 billion per year — far exceeding its $19 billion annualized revenue run rate. Broadcom's residual-value backstop on the senior tranches (approximately $6 billion Senior A1 notes and approximately $24 billion Senior A2 notes) allows these slices to carry Broadcom's investment-grade rating rather than Anthropic's, making $71 billion in private credit accessible to a company still in a cash-burning growth phase.

What to watch

Anthropic is targeting an October 2026 IPO debut with a confidential S-1 filed June 1, led by Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, and JPMorgan, anchored at a $965 billion post-money valuation from its Series H raise. The SPV debt structure remains invisible to public-market investors evaluating the equity story, so the IPO will raise equity capital for corporate operations separately from this hardware-backed debt.