00:00Blackstone holding early talks with investors to gauge interest in a second mega debt package to
00:05finance Anthropik's use of chips from Google. The potential new round of financing comes on
00:09the heels of Anthropik's confidential IPO filing. Emily Grafeo has been writing about this and she
00:14joins us now. So what do we know? What do we not know about this right now? So one thing
00:18we know,
00:19Scarlett, is that this is very early on in the stages of Blackstone pitching this to investors.
00:24We actually don't know really the true size and structure of this deal. We know that Blackstone
00:29had held early discussions with investors. The number 36 billion was floated. So what they're
00:36trying to do here is get credit funding to help Anthropik build out its AI infrastructure to buy
00:44and to lease chips. We know that chips are very expensive and a lot of the funding so far this
00:49year has been data center financing and now we're kind of pivoting to chip financing. So if we actually
00:56did see a $36 billion deal, that would be the largest private credit financing on record. It would
01:01be larger than the $35 billion Apollo led chip financing that we reported about a couple weeks
01:07ago. What does it tell us about the stage of AI build out that we're in? I mean, you mentioned
01:12chips as opposed to data centers. Right. Yeah. So Apollo and Broadcom and Anthropik had announced a
01:20couple weeks ago that they're trying to build 20 gigawatts of compute capacity. The $35 billion deal
01:28that was for one gigawatt. So what we know is that there's going to be a lot more compute capacity
01:34that needs to be built, essentially a lot more credit that will need to be raised to fund the
01:40build out of that. But again, this is very early on. That $35 billion deal has a very complicated
01:46structure. It has a delayed draw structure. And so once those draws start, some of that debt is
01:53going to be starting to trade. So I've spoken to a couple investors that have said that, yeah,
01:57they're actually not even ready to buy a new deal because they're still trying to get their hands on
02:03that initial deal. But there's going to be a lot coming. Okay. So Anthropik is spending a lot
02:08because it's in a race with everyone else against OpenAI, against others. I mentioned earlier that it
02:13filed confidentially for an IPO. I mean, that will bring in money as well. What do we know about
02:18the timeline for an IPO and whether that opens the door to other ways of funding? Yeah, I mean,
02:23that would certainly give them some equity to maybe put to work in their build out of AI.
02:29Another element here is Broadcom's involvement. Broadcom had backstopped the senior portions of the
02:35debt on that $35 billion chip financing. This new deal, we don't know yet if Broadcom will be
02:41involved, but probably likely that some portion of this debt will have that Broadcom backstop.
02:47That gives it a higher credit rating than just if Anthropik came to the market. So we talk a lot
02:54about circular financing. Yes. All these partnerships. It's kind of a lot of companies coming together in
03:00order to secure the best form of financing right now.
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