AMD raises $4.75bn in its biggest ever bond sale

AMD has raised $4.75bn in its biggest ever US dollar bond offering, sold in four tranches with maturities from three to ten years. It held $13.1bn in cash against $3.2bn of debt at the end of June, and has committed up to $5bn to Anthropic.

AMD has raised $4.75bn in the largest dollar bond sale it has ever done. The notes went out in four tranches with maturities from three to ten years, and demand was strong enough that the longest tranche priced about a quarter of a percentage point tighter than first indicated, at 0.9 points over Treasuries.

The company was not short of money. At the end of June it held $13.1bn in cash and short-term investments against $3.2bn of debt, which is an unusually clean balance sheet for a chipmaker at this scale.

What it has taken on is a commitment to a customer. In July AMD agreed to invest up to $5bn in Anthropic, alongside a partnership to deploy as much as two gigawatts of its Instinct MI450 chips to run Claude.

AMD has not connected the two. The filing says proceeds are for general corporate purposes, possibly including debt repayment, and the company has $875mn of bonds maturing next month.

The sizes are still hard to look past. The raise is $4.75bn and the Anthropic commitment is up to $5bn.

Either way it fits the shape the AI trade has taken, in which suppliers fund the customers who buy from them. Google has been running the same circular playbook with Anthropic, and Nvidia has gone further still, discussing guarantees over OpenAI’s data centre debt.

The underlying business is not imaginary. Analysts expect AMD revenue to climb 47% this year to more than $51bn, helped by the Anthropic agreement and a separate deal with Microsoft.

The borrowing is part of something much bigger. Big Tech’s AI debt has passed $350bn, and investment-grade issuers are now a routine part of that total rather than an exception.

Six banks ran the deal, among them JPMorgan, Citigroup and Bank of America. AMD last visited the investment-grade market in March 2025, when it raised $1.5bn, so this is more than three times that in 17 months.

A spokesperson said the company is “committed to maintaining its strong financial balance sheet,” which by any conventional measure it has. The interesting question is what a chipmaker holding $13bn in cash wants another $4.75bn for.