Good afternoon and welcome to Markets Desk, your midday read on the stories moving money and markets.
Apollo and Blackstone have closed one of the largest private credit deals in recent memory, raising thirty-five billion dollars in chip financing for Anthropic. The transaction underscores just how aggressively institutional capital is chasing AI infrastructure, and it gives the Claude maker serious runway to scale compute and compete at the frontier.
That backdrop makes Perplexity's IPO timeline all the more interesting. CEO Aravind Srinivas told CNBC the company intends to go public in twenty twenty-eight, regardless of what Anthropic or OpenAI do. With Anthropic now confidentially filed and the AI IPO pipeline quietly building, the window for these listings is beginning to take shape.
Meanwhile, a geopolitical headwind is back on the table. The Pentagon has expanded its list of Chinese military-linked companies to include Alibaba and Baidu, a significant escalation that briefly surfaced in February before being pulled without explanation. The timing is notable given recent diplomatic overtures, and investors in both names will be watching Washington closely for any follow-through in the form of sanctions or restrictions.
That's the tape. Markets Desk, signing off the floor.
