The week's largest AI number is a $35 billion loan

The largest AI number in the week was a loan, a $35 billion credit facility that Blackstone and Apollo are negotiating with Anthropic—our records carry it as a negotiation rather than a signed transaction—and the scale of it reframes what this buildout is being financed with. A figure that size is likely to be underwritten against assets, not a promise—power, sites, contracted capacity—and the rest of the week's deals read like that collateral being assembled while the term sheet sits open.

Set the facility against the rest of the week's closed deals and the arithmetic does the arguing: Asp Data Center closed at $1.6 billion, which the facility exceeds by more than twentyfold, and the other closed deals run from $165 million down to $25 million. The week contains no comparable equity round for an AI developer, which suggests the capital driving this cycle is now priced as a claim on the things a model runs on, not as a bet on the model itself.

RWE appears twice in the week's deals, and both entries point the same way: the larger transaction brings RWE, Engie North America, ERCOT, Clearway Energy, Scout Clean Energy and Oracle to the same table, and our records size it at 1,700; a second, smaller one pairs RWE with Oracle at 433. The party list is the interesting part. The firm that intends to run the load and the firms that can generate it have contracted directly, which points to the interconnection queue, not the model layer, as the place this buildout gets scheduled next—a different problem to underwrite than a model's revenue line, and a more legible one for anyone pricing credit.

The data-center side moved in the same window. CoreWeave, Blockfusion and Blue Acquisition Corp. announced a deal; Bitdeer Technologies Group and its Bitdeer AI unit announced one of their own; Crusoe closed a transaction. Asp Data Center's $1.6 billion deal, unlike most of what surrounds it in this run, closed.

The physical layer gets bought before the model layer does, and this week's deals are that argument with numbers attached. Equity in a developer is a residual claim on a business whose cost base is being set by contracts signed this week by other parties, while debt against the physical layer is a claim that holds its value even if model economics compress. No coverage yet says which assets would secure the Anthropic facility, but if it closes as described, the week's largest AI financing will sit on Blackstone's and Apollo's books instead of in a venture fund—a lending judgment made against contracted cash flows, and the right one for firms that would rather own the plug than the promise.

Away from AI, the week belonged to real assets and credit funds; nothing in the second tier carried the weight of a $35 billion negotiation, but the shape of the money was the same—hard collateral, contracted income, and lenders willing to price both.

This round of money is going underneath the models, into the power and the sites a lender can underwrite. What happens next is a credit question, not a valuation one: watch whether Blackstone and Apollo warehouse the whole $35 billion or lay it off to a bank group, because that will say how much of the physical layer the credit market is prepared to finance on its own book.