Anthropic is offering Blackstone a yield above 10% on chip debt, the Financial Times reported on Friday, citing people familiar with the talks. Reuters said it could not verify the report, and none of the coverage I read carries a confirmation from either company.

The package, as other outlets relayed the FT’s account, is called Project North Star: about $60 billion to pay for roughly 1.5 gigawatts of Google’s custom TPUs, which would make it the largest chip financing so far. Blackstone funds would put in $9 billion of junior debt backed by Anthropic’s five-year lease payments on the chips, half of an $18 billion junior tranche, with a 10% coupon and total returns above that once issuance discounts are counted. Keep the numbers apart, because the short Reuters version reads like a $9 billion chip deal and it isn’t. Nine billion is Blackstone’s piece.

One write-up of an Il Sole 24 Ore account says Anthropic raised around $4.4 billion through a similar deal called Project Big Sky at 8.5% about four months ago, and that a comparable credit pays roughly 7% on the ICE BofA BB high-yield index. I have only seen those two figures secondhand, not in the FT original, so take them with a grain of salt. If they hold, the lease-backed paper pays about a point and a half more than the last one and three points more than the public market. Junior debt eats losses first, so a fat coupon on that tranche is not the same thing as the whole $60 billion costing 10%. Credit isn’t my lane, and I would not read a verdict into one tranche’s price.

What I can say is how this fits with what’s already on the page. Earlier this month, Anthropic’s IPO prospectus showed Broadcom lending up to $42 billion toward a TPU lease, the chip supplier financing its own customer. This one has the same bones with a different lender: a private-credit buyer wants double digits for the risky end of the stack. I called Nvidia’s version of this vendor financing with extra steps in August, and Anthropic’s $5 billion AMD bet was supposed to be the hedge against all of it. Another TPU deal doesn’t look like a hedge.

Sources