NEW YORK—The term sheet was unusual even by the standards of the AI boom: a chip designer, a private-equity firm built on insurance money and the world’s largest alternative asset manager pooling capital into a platform meant to deploy more than 20 gigawatts of computing power by 2028.
Broadcom Inc. on June 9 launched its AI XPV Platform with an initial tranche of $35 billion led by Apollo Global Management, in partnership with Blackstone and a group of global banks. The first money goes to Anthropic, which will use it to expand its compute capacity by more than 1 gigawatt at sites run by Fluidstack, a cloud infrastructure company, starting in the middle of this year.
The structure is new. Rather than financing individual data centers one lease at a time, the platform is a standing facility that Broadcom can draw on as its customers, including Anthropic and OpenAI, place orders for the custom processors and networking gear the company designs. Apollo’s funds will provide committed capital across a multi-year draw schedule, with banks arranging the debt.
Broadcom’s stake in the deal is strategic. The company has become the primary supplier of custom AI chips, or XPUs, to Google and other hyperscalers, and it signed a deal with OpenAI last year to develop custom processors. Its chief executive, Hock Tan, has said repeatedly that demand for AI compute is growing faster than traditional capital markets can accommodate, and that pairing his company’s chips with patient money is the way to close the gap.
The numbers help explain why. Twenty gigawatts is roughly the capacity of the entire hyperscale data-center fleet that existed a few years ago. Broadcom said the platform is designed to support more than 20 gigawatts of compute capacity through 2028, using its XPUs and networking solutions, a scale that implies tens of billions of dollars of chip sales for Broadcom if the deployments materialize.
For Apollo, the bet is that AI infrastructure is becoming a new asset class. Jamshid Ehsani, a partner at Apollo, called the transaction the largest private financing ever executed, and described AI compute as an emerging asset class with contracted cash flows and mission-critical utility. Apollo, which manages more than $700 billion largely from retirement annuities, has been moving into infrastructure debt as an alternative to bonds.
Blackstone’s participation signals how far private capital has moved into the AI buildout. The firm’s president, Jon Gray, said the demand for compute has created an opportunity to invest at scale across the AI infrastructure ecosystem, including through its credit and insurance business. Blackstone earlier this year joined Google in a venture to build cloud capacity around Google’s tensor processing units, committing $5 billion of equity.
The platform is a direct answer to the question of who pays for the AI buildout. The largest cloud companies are funding their own campuses with operating cash flow and debt, but the frontier labs, Anthropic and OpenAI, do not have that luxury. Their revenue, while growing, is still small relative to the cost of the compute they consume. Private capital, in the form of platforms like XPV, fills the gap between what the labs can afford and what they need.
Anthropic has been the most aggressive user of this model. The company has signed cloud contracts with Amazon, which invested billions and runs Anthropic’s models on its own chips, with CoreWeave, with Akamai and with xAI, whose Memphis data centers Anthropic rents at a reported cost of more than $100 million a month. The XPV money adds a channel tied directly to Broadcom’s silicon, giving Anthropic a hedge against the dominance of Nvidia.
The deal also deepens the rivalry between Broadcom and Nvidia. Nvidia has used its own balance sheet to support customers, guaranteeing billions of dollars of lease payments for OpenAI’s data centers, a practice critics have called circular financing. Broadcom’s answer is to bring third-party capital into the equation, letting Apollo and Blackstone carry the financing risk while Broadcom supplies the chips.
Markets noticed. Broadcom’s shares rose about 3% in premarket trading on the announcement, extending a run that has made the company one of the most valuable in the semiconductor industry. Analysts said the platform could add meaningfully to Broadcom’s revenue visibility, since the financing facility is tied to deployment commitments rather than spot orders.
The risks are the same ones that shadow every AI infrastructure deal. If the boom stalls, or if the labs’ revenue fails to grow into their commitments, the platform’s debt will have to be restructured, and the losses will land on the insurers and pension funds whose money Apollo manages. Skeptics note that every technology cycle has ended with overcapacity somewhere.
For now, the momentum is all one way. The $35 billion tranche is described as the first pillar of the platform, with Broadcom executives signaling more to come as Anthropic and OpenAI scale their deployments. The message to the market is simple: the AI buildout is no longer just a technology story. It is a finance story, and the checks are getting bigger.
