Apollo and Blackstone Close $35 Billion Private Credit Deal to Finance AI Chips for Anthropic and OpenAI

The Structure

On June 9, 2026, Apollo Global Management announced that Apollo-managed funds and affiliates are leading what it described as an initial $35 billion capital solution for Broadcom's new AI XPV Platform, according to The AI Consulting Network's coverage of the announcement.

The mechanics: Broadcom established the platform with Apollo and Blackstone's Credit and Insurance business as anchor investors, alongside a syndicate of global banks. Apollo was advised by Goldman Sachs, Wells Fargo, and Citi.

A special-purpose vehicle raises debt and equity to acquire Broadcom's custom XPU chips and networking infrastructure, then leases them to AI companies. The lease payments service the debt. Broadcom backstops the senior tranches.

How the Debt Is Priced

The tranche breakdown, as reported by Private Debt News, shows who bears what risk.

The $6 billion A1 notes sold to banks at 100 basis points over Treasuries — essentially investment-grade pricing. The $24 billion A2 notes priced at 5.75%, with Apollo's Athene insurance arm buying a portion. The $4.5 billion B notes, which carry NO Broadcom backstop, priced at 8.5%.

Apollo's Atlas SP put in $800 million of equity, making it the SPV's formal owner.

About half the total debt was syndicated out. The early focus of the platform is Anthropic's compute expansion, with more than one gigawatt of infrastructure expected to deploy at Fluidstack-based sites beginning in mid-2026, per The AI Consulting Network.

The Broader xAI Thread

Separate from the Anthropic/OpenAI platform deal, Apollo has also been working to make a $3.5 billion chip loan for Elon Musk's xAI tradable on secondary markets, according to Private Equity Insights. That loan was arranged through a special-purpose vehicle set up by Valor Equity Partners, one of xAI's key backers, with Nvidia participating in the vehicle and Apollo leading the debt portion.

Apollo has told other lenders it is willing to purchase additional portions of that loan at par. The firm traded more than $6.7 billion of private credit in 2025, and the xAI move is consistent with its stated strategy of acting as a market maker in investment-grade private credit deals.

xAI separately announced a $20 billion equity raise and is expected to rely on additional structured financing as it scales data-center capacity.

Why This Scale

Broadcom's Won Kim framed the demand driver plainly: AI compute is growing faster than traditional capital markets can accommodate. The four largest U.S. hyperscalers are expected to deploy more than $500 billion into data-center infrastructure in 2026 alone, according to The AI Consulting Network. U.S. data-center construction spending surpassed office construction for the first time in late 2025.

The $35 billion platform is designed to enable more than 20 gigawatts of compute capacity through 2028.

The Concern Worth Taking Seriously

Not everyone is comfortable with the direction private credit is heading. At the Bloomberg Global Credit Forum, Davidson Kempner's Suzanne Gibbons said EBITDA addbacks have doubled across the market, meaning loans that appear to carry 45% loan-to-value ratios are effectively closer to 65% when you strip out the accounting adjustments. Former SDNY U.S. Attorney Jay Clayton said his office is examining managers who mark a loan at 95 cents while the rest of the market prices it at 75.

These are legitimate structural concerns. If the underlying AI companies don't generate the revenue needed to cover lease payments — and frontier AI labs are burning capital at extraordinary rates — the SPV math breaks down fast. The Broadcom backstop on senior tranches provides a buffer, but the $4.5 billion B tranche at 8.5% has no such protection.

Apollo's own Jim Zelter warned of two more quarters of turbulence in private credit, saying the industry is learning "who are our longer-term friends and who are the shorter-term tourists."

Retail Investors Are Already Hitting Walls

The same week the Anthropic deal closed, three major retail private credit funds restricted withdrawals. Blackstone capped BCRED at its 5% quarterly limit after investors sought 10%, a record. Cliffwater gated its $31 billion flagship after redemption requests hit 17%, returning roughly a third. Monroe capped for the first time after investors sought 9%.

The default rate in private credit hit 6% at the end of April, the highest since Fitch began tracking the measure, according to Private Debt News.

The retail redemption wave and the record-size AI chip deals exist in the same market at the same moment. Big institutional capital is flowing in at the top of the structure while retail investors try to get out. That tension remains unresolved beneath all of it.

What Comes Next

The Broadcom platform has a multi-year draw schedule, meaning the $35 billion is committed but deployed over time, not all at once. The first deployments are expected to begin in mid-2026 at Fluidstack sites. Whether the lease payment structure holds up as AI lab revenues mature — Anthropic filed confidentially for an IPO and was valued at $965 billion on a $65 billion raise — is the central credit question that won't be answered for years.