Three ways AI compute is being paid for

Banks finance the chips

A $63 billion transaction to enable the deployment of AI compute capacity for Anthropic will be executed through a newly formed special purpose vehicle. Bank of America, Citi and Morgan Stanley are arranging the first lien portion, with Blackstone as the sole provider of the committed portion of the second lien financing.

Private equity buys and leases

SpaceX disclosed a binding commitment for roughly $40 billion in financing for AI chips and related data center equipment, with an entity managed by Apollo Global Management buying the hardware and leasing it to SpaceX.

Meta turns to shareholders

Meta plans to sell new stock to raise money for its AI infrastructure buildout, and according to The Information, the company plans to sell up to $95 billion in shares. The Class C shares carry no voting rights, which lets Meta raise money without diluting Zuckerberg's control.

What we can watch

Put side by side, these three stories show lenders, private equity and shareholders each carrying part of the cost of AI infrastructure. For those of us in credit and risk, a fair question is where our own institutions sit in these structures, and whether we can see who is on the other side of the lease.