Asset management firm Blackstone has held early discussions with investors around a potential large-scale debt package to finance Anthropic’s use of Google AI accelerator chips, Bloomberg reported.

One initial proposal for the new debt deal was for at least $36bn (£26.8bn), according to the report, which would exceed the $35bn that Apollo Global Management and Blackstone arranged about two months ago, also to fund Anthropic’s lease of Google AI chips.

That deal was one of the largest private credit transactions in history.

The new potential financing arrangement comes as tech companies strike complex and often circular deals involving AI chips, data centres and other infrastructure.

Google, which was one of Anthropic’s earliest investors, has been increasingly backstopping financing deals that involve buying chips and computing power through Google Cloud.

Google’s far-reaching infrastructure financing programme, constructed to enable Anthropic to buy access to Google’s own chips and data centre capacity, encompasses more than $150bn worth of Google’s Tensor Processing Unit (TPU) chips, according to an estimate by the Financial Times.

A deal announced in April giving Anthropic access to Google AI processing power involves commitments by Anthropic to pay Google some $200bn over the next five years, The Information reported.

The figures suggested that Anthropic accounted for more than 40 percent of the cloud revenue backlog Google disclosed at the time.

Google said it would invest an additional $10bn or more into Anthropic as part of their arrangement.