Broadcom Co-Signs a $63 Billion Chip Loan for Anthropic

On Monday, October 26, Anthropic filed the paperwork for one of the largest stock market listings in history. Hours later, a second announcement explained how a large part of the Anthropic machine gets paid for. Bank of America (BAC), Blackstone (BX), Citigroup (C) and Morgan Stanley (MS) unveiled a $63 billion financing package to buy AI chips and networking gear from Broadcom (AVGO). Anthropic itself does not borrow the money and does not buy the chips. A separate vehicle borrows, buys and leases. And Broadcom, the seller of the equipment, stands behind the biggest slice of the debt.

That last part is the story. Vendor financing, where a supplier helps a customer pay, is an old practice. A guarantee of this size, from the chipmaker to the lenders funding its own sale, is something else. It turns a hardware order into a long term financial promise, and Broadcom shareholders now carry risk that used to sit only with banks.

What happened

The joint announcement, carried by Dow Jones Newswires, says the four firms will form a special purpose vehicle to purchase Broadcom XPU AI accelerators and networking products, and lease that equipment to Anthropic. XPU is Broadcom's name for the custom AI chips it designs with large customers, as an alternative to general purpose graphics processors. The deal sits inside a compute capacity agreement Broadcom had announced earlier, and deliveries are expected to begin in 2027.

Broadcom chief executive Hock Tan presented the package as proof that the money is there. "Fundamentally, the need for AI compute continues to grow at an extraordinary pace," Tan said in the announcement. "This validates that there is capital available to finance such growth and that Broadcom is uniquely positioned to enable it."

The announcement does not disclose the split between the debt layers, the interest rates or the lease length. Reuters, citing two sources familiar with the matter, reported that the first lien portion comes to about $43.5 billion, or 69% of the total.

How the structure works

Four terms do most of the work in this deal, and each decides who loses money first if things go wrong.

A special purpose vehicle, or SPV, is a company created for one job and nothing else. This SPV exists to borrow money, buy Broadcom equipment and lease it to Anthropic, which keeps the debt off Anthropic's balance sheet and gives lenders a clean claim on the hardware and the lease payments.

First lien debt is the senior layer. A lien is a legal claim on an asset. First lien lenders, here the loans arranged by Bank of America (BAC), Citigroup (C) and Morgan Stanley (MS), get paid first from the lease income and have the first claim on the equipment.

Second lien debt sits behind that. Blackstone (BX) provides the committed portion of this layer. Second lien lenders get paid after the senior lenders and take a loss earlier if the money runs short, which is why this layer normally charges a higher rate. Blackstone is an asset manager, not a bank: much of the AI buildout is now funded by private credit.

Residual value support is Broadcom's piece. Residual value is what the gear is worth at the end of the lease. Broadcom promises support equal to the first lien portion. In plain terms, if the equipment ends up worth far less than expected, or the lease income falls short, Broadcom covers the gap for the senior lenders, up to that amount. Reuters described it as effectively a significant guarantee: the chipmaker is co-signing its customer's loan.

Why Anthropic needs financing on this scale

The S-1 Anthropic filed the same day shows a company growing faster than almost any before it, and signing bills to match. Revenue reached $16.3 billion in the first half of 2026, against $4.6 billion for all of 2025. Spending on compute and infrastructure came to about $8.9 billion in that half, roughly 55% of revenue. Non-cancelable purchase commitments, contracts payable even if demand cools, stood at $265.6 billion on June 30, 2026. Adding separate capacity agreements together, reporting has put the wider total above $500 billion over the coming years, although the categories overlap and the filing does not print a single combined figure.

Leasing through an SPV spreads that bill. Anthropic gets the capacity without paying $63 billion upfront, and for a company preparing to list on Nasdaq under the planned ticker ANT, the structure keeps a very large loan away from its own reported debt.

The part that nearly did not happen

Reporting by The Wall Street Journal, covered by TheStreet, tells a harder story than the announcement. According to that reporting, Tan spent nearly two months pushing the banks to commit, some lenders judged the pay too low for the risk and considered walking away, and the package only held together after last-minute weekend talks in which Broadcom agreed to higher interest rates.

That detail matters because it prices the risk in public. The capital was available, as Tan said, at a higher price than first offered, and with the seller guaranteeing the senior layer.

Who carries which risk

Anthropic carries the operating risk: lease payments are due whether or not demand for Claude keeps compounding. The senior lenders carry the least risk, sitting first in line for the lease income and the hardware, with Broadcom's support behind their layer. Blackstone (BX) carries more, since the second lien layer absorbs losses before the senior debt is touched, in exchange for a higher return.

Broadcom carries the unusual risk. If AI chip prices fall fast, as hardware prices do when a newer generation arrives, the gap between what the equipment was financed for and what it is worth lands on Broadcom's promise. The support is sized to the senior debt, reported at about $43.5 billion. That is not a loss, and it only bites in a bad scenario, but it is a contingent promise far larger than a normal sales contract. Broadcom shareholders own the chip business and, now, a slice of that promise too.

The bull case

The optimistic reading starts with demand. Anthropic's revenue grew about 1,300% year over year in the first half, and its filing says suppliers cannot yet provide all the capacity it wants. Financing that unlocks deliveries from 2027 converts into Broadcom revenue that might otherwise have waited for Anthropic to raise the cash itself, and a customer leasing Broadcom XPUs through a Broadcom-backed vehicle is building its next years of capacity around Broadcom designs. If AI spending keeps growing, the guarantee costs nothing.

The bear case

The cautious reading starts with circularity. Broadcom reports the sale, the sale is funded by debt, and the debt is made acceptable by Broadcom's own guarantee. Revenue booked that way is real, but its quality depends on a promise from the same company that booked it. AI accelerators also age brutally. A chip that is scarce in 2027 can be second tier by 2029, and residual values are where that ageing shows up. Anthropic is one customer, however large, and its S-1 warns that growth will slow. If it slows faster than the lease schedule assumes, the payments continue and the argument moves to the guarantee.

What to watch next

Three things will show whether this structure becomes the template for AI infrastructure or a one-off: fuller disclosure of the support in Broadcom's own filings, the start of deliveries in 2027, and Anthropic's first reports as a public company under the planned ticker ANT, which will show the revenue line those lease payments have to be carried by.

This article is for information purposes only and is not financial advice.

Cover: server racks at the Pi Datacenters facility in Amravati, India. Photo by PiDatacenters (CC BY-SA 4.0), via Wikimedia Commons.