Banks and Blackstone commit $63 billion for Anthropic chips

Northstar Compute LLC, a new compute finance and lease platform, has completed an inaugural capital raise of $63 billion in debt and equity to finance AI compute capacity for Anthropic using Broadcom technology, Milbank, the law firm that represented North Star, said. The raise was arranged by Bank of America, Blackstone, Citi and Morgan Stanley, and the money will flow through a newly formed special purpose vehicle that buys Broadcom XPU AI accelerators and networking equipment and leases it to Anthropic, with deliveries expected to start in 2027.

The first lien portion is being arranged by Bank of America, Citi and Morgan Stanley, Blackstone is the sole provider of the committed second lien portion, and Broadcom is providing residual value support to the vehicle in an amount equivalent to the first lien. Datacenter Dynamics, reporting the Wall Street Journal, said Broadcom chief executive Hock Tan spent two months organising the deal and held talks with the banks over the weekend of October 24 and 25 to finalise their commitments, with the banks agreeing to higher interest rates and Broadcom offering guarantees against losses if Anthropic defaults. The transaction forms part of the strategic compute capacity agreement Broadcom had previously announced, and it lands the day Anthropic publicly filed its S-1, which put its aggregate compute commitments in the hundreds of billions of dollars.