Anthropic needs more compute than it can pay for. Broadcom needs Anthropic to keep buying. So the chipmaker just solved both problems at once — by guaranteeing the loan that buys its own chips.
According to Reuters, Bank of America, Blackstone, Citi, and Morgan Stanley will provide $63 billion in financing to buy Broadcom's AI accelerators and networking gear for Anthropic, in one of the largest debt deals ever tied to the AI buildout. A newly formed special purpose vehicle will buy the hardware and lease it to Anthropic, with deliveries starting in 2027.
The structure is the story. About $43.5 billion of the financing is first-lien senior debt, arranged by Bank of America, Citi, and Morgan Stanley, with Blackstone as the sole provider of the committed second-lien portion. And Broadcom is providing "residual value support" to the lenders — effectively a guarantee that absorbs the loss if the chips are worth less than the debt when the lease ends. One analyst pegged Broadcom's peak exposure at $43 billion in the first year, according to MarketWatch.
This is not a one-off. Apollo and Blackstone already agreed to finance a $35 billion expansion of Anthropic's computing capacity under a prior Broadcom deal, with a backstop of up to $29 billion. And Anthropic's IPO filing, made public the same day, discloses about $161.2 billion in five-year master equipment leases with Broadcom. The $63 billion is a down payment on a much larger tab. Broadcom CEO Hock Tan framed it as proof the system works: "Fundamentally, the need for AI compute continues to grow at an extraordinary pace. This validates that there is capital available to finance such growth and that Broadcom is uniquely positioned to enable it."
The more skeptical read is that the capital is available because the seller is standing behind it. Moody's, while calling Broadcom one of the strongest large technology companies, warned the risk would increase if multiple such transactions pile up over a short period to fund frontier AI labs. SpaceX borrowed $40 billion for GPUs this week; Meta is asking shareholders to fund $95 billion of AI spending. The pattern is the same everywhere: the AI boom is increasingly financed on credit, and the people selling the picks and shovels are increasingly the ones guaranteeing the loans.
— via Reuters