Blackstone Credit & Insurance (BXCI) was named Lender of the Year in the Americas. Judges were impressed at the breadth of market leading deals on which it provided debt.

Members of the independent judging panel also remarked on the fact that BXCI is one of the fastest growing and most critical parts of the firm, with its assets under management (AUM) growing to over $330 billion over the past years.

The submission said: “BXCI has navigated immense change, challenges and opportunities over the judging period – including the integration of our credit and insurance groups together. The team has also navigated a period of high and volatile interest rates incredibly well and continues to deliver strong investment performance.”

BXCI deployed $11.8 billion in the second quarter and $46.2 billion over the last 12 months driven by US direct lending as well infrastructure and asset-based credit strategies.

In the judging period, CoreWeave, the AI hyperscaler, announced it signed a definitive agreement for a $7.5 billion debt financing facility led by funds managed by Blackstone with strategic participation from Magnetar (co-lead investor) and Coatue.

Participation in the financing also included Carlyle, CDPQ, DigitalBridge Credit, funds and accounts managed by BlackRock, Eldridge Industries, and Great Elm Capital Corp. The financing will be used to further develop CoreWeave’s growing fleet of high-performance compute to execute existing contracts with leading enterprise customers and AI innovators.

Blackstone provided an initial $600 million senior secured credit facility to support the development of Aligned Data Center’s newest and largest data center in West Jordan, Utah. The senior secured credit facility is committed entirely by insurance accounts managed by BXCI’s Infrastructure & Asset Based Credit Group.

Meanwhile, Barclays Bank Delaware (BBDE) entered into an agreement with insurance accounts managed by Blackstone’s Asset Based Finance group, to sell approximately $1.1 billion of currently outstanding credit card receivables in relation to a defined set of Barclays-branded credit card accounts in the United States of America. This is the first in a series of activities Barclays plans to conduct to reduce its risk-weighted assets and create additional lending capacity for BBDE.

As part of the transaction, BBDE will enter into a long-term strategic forward flow sale and servicing arrangement with Blackstone related to the Accounts. Blackstone’s investment will be made entirely on behalf of the firm’s insurance clients.