AI's risk goes off the books, but still lurks

The vehicle is called Compute SPV. Atlas SP Partners, the financing arm of Apollo Global Management, an asset manager, formed it for a single purpose: to issue $35 billion of debt, one of the largest private-credit deals ever written, and use the proceeds to buy the chips that Anthropic will lease for the next five years. Those lease payments are what give the debt its value. The structure is old, routine, and close to invisible, the kind of arrangement blue-chip borrowers have used for decades to fund enormous obligations without carrying them on their own books. What is new is the borrower, the asset, and the lengths to which everyone involved has gone to make a startup's promise look like something safer.

It is also the latest and largest run of a maneuver the AI buildout has been rehearsing all year. In October Meta placed its Hyperion data center in Louisiana into a vehicle called Beignet, raising some $30 billion from Blue Owl, a private-capital firm, and bondholders led by PIMCO, while keeping the debt off its own balance sheet and chopping the leases into four-year pieces so that rating agencies would not count them as borrowing. By the Financial Times's reckoning, technology companies have now moved more than $120 billion of data-center spending into such vehicles, shielding their credit ratings while the liabilities sit where the public accounts do not show them. The appeal is plain enough: capital expenditure becomes someone else's, leverage stops denting the rating, and the borrowing that funds the buildout never appears where an analyst looks first.

Big Sky borrows that template and strains it. The hyperscalers running the same play — Meta and Oracle — are investment-grade firms shielding balance sheets that were already strong, so the structure merely flatters credit they already possess. Anthropic, still private and preparing to go public, has no such credit to flatter, and did not show the lenders on this deal its financials. The creditworthiness, in other words, had to be manufactured, and the manufacturing is the most revealing part of the deal.