Broadcom is in talks with lenders to raise more than $60 billion in debt to fund custom AI chips and networking gear for Anthropic, Bloomberg reported Thursday. By Friday, CNBC put the expected size at upwards of $70 billion, with lenders working toward a senior tranche of roughly $45 billion and a junior tranche of about $35 billion. Bloomberg’s version of the structure — a $60–70 billion senior secured piece plus roughly $30 billion junior — would push the package toward $100 billion.
The number is moving because the deal is not done. Blackstone and Apollo Global Management are among the investors in discussions to participate. Broadcom would guarantee a portion of the senior secured tranche. Everything else is still being negotiated.
The size is the headline. The structure is the story.
Anthropic does not buy the chips
The financing runs through a special-purpose vehicle. Investors put up the capital, the vehicle buys the hardware, and the hardware is leased to Anthropic. Anthropic gets compute without the chips ever landing on its balance sheet as an asset or the debt landing there as a liability. Broadcom gets a very large order it does not have to finance itself.
This is not a first draft. In June, Broadcom, Apollo and Blackstone launched a vehicle called AI XPV whose opening deal raised $35 billion to expand Anthropic’s computing capacity with Broadcom custom silicon and networking — roughly one gigawatt of capacity, against a stated partnership target of more than 20 gigawatts delivered to leading AI labs by 2028. The current talks are the same machine, run at twice to three times the size, ninety days later.
Our take: AI capex has stopped being a technology story and become a credit story. When the incremental dollar of compute is funded by senior secured paper and private credit rather than retained earnings, the constraint on the buildout is no longer chip supply or power — it is the price of risk. Watch the spread on the junior tranche. That number tells you what sophisticated lenders actually think the residual value of a 2026 accelerator is in 2031, and it will move long before any model benchmark does.
Why the balance sheets stay clean
Off-balance-sheet financing for AI infrastructure is now standard practice across the sector, and Broadcom is not the only one running it. Nvidia guaranteed roughly $105 billion of lease payments tied to Ohio data-centre capacity it does not owe. Broadcom itself fell 6% earlier this month on disclosure of a $370 billion financing backstop that does not sit on its books. Oracle cut 21,000 jobs while raising capex by $34.5 billion.
The common thread: the compute is real, the revenue expectations behind it are aggressive, and the obligations are distributed across vehicles, guarantees and leases rather than concentrated in one place a reader can check in a 10-K. None of that is improper. All of it makes the aggregate exposure genuinely hard to measure from the outside — which is precisely the condition under which credit markets tend to misprice things.
Anthropic’s side of the trade is easier to read. The company told investors its annualised revenue run rate reached about $65 billion at the end of July, and it confidentially filed a draft S-1 in June. A firm heading toward a public listing has an obvious reason to prefer leased compute over $80 billion of purchased hardware and matching debt on the pre-IPO balance sheet.
What to watch
- The final size and the tranching. If the junior piece grows relative to senior, lenders are demanding more equity-like compensation for residual-value risk.
- Whether Broadcom’s guarantee widens. A partial guarantee on the senior tranche is a modest commitment. Anything broader moves real risk back onto Broadcom.
- Lease terms and duration. The economics turn entirely on what these accelerators are assumed to be worth at the end of the lease.
- The S-1. When Anthropic files publicly, the compute commitments have to be disclosed. That will be the first clean look at what leasing rather than owning actually costs.
- Copycats. The template is public and now twice-priced. Expect at least one more lab to be financed this way before year end.
Talks are ongoing and terms may change materially. Neither company has commented publicly.