The banking documents went out this week, and they describe a figure that even veteran debt bankers had rarely seen: $42 billion in a single senior-secured tranche, the largest chip-financing transaction ever structured. Bank of America, Citigroup and Morgan Stanley began sending syndication letters for the deal, which sits inside a $60 billion debt package being assembled to fund AI chips for Anthropic and other companies.
Broadcom is the force behind the package, according to people with knowledge of the matter. The chipmaker’s Wall Street syndicate started gathering the financing in early October, with the $42 billion Class A tranche coming first. Blackstone is leading an $18 billion Class B junior tranche, committing $9 billion of its own capital and syndicating the rest.
The structure makes Broadcom more than a supplier. It provides a residual-value guarantee that backs the senior tranche, leaning on its investment-grade A-minus rating. Lenders in the Class A tranche are therefore betting on Broadcom’s creditworthiness as much as on Anthropic’s ability to pay, while holders of the Class B debt take Anthropic’s credit risk directly and are expected to hold off committing their full allocation until after Anthropic’s planned initial public offering.
The money funds a specific obligation. Anthropic has signed a five-year, $125.2 billion lease for tensor processing units, the chips Google co-designs with Broadcom and Broadcom manufactures and sells. The $60 billion package covers roughly half of that commitment, with lease payments beginning once the hardware is delivered. The chips are slated for 2027 delivery.
The arrangement runs through a special-purpose vehicle that buys the chips, leases them to Anthropic, and uses the lease payments to service the debt. Anthropic runs its Claude models on the chips and earns revenue that pays the lease, which pays the lenders, which keeps the financing circular and, in theory, self-supporting.
Anthropic’s IPO filing added a second layer. The prospectus shows Broadcom has separately agreed to lend Anthropic up to $42 billion through convertible notes that can convert into equity, to cover infrastructure spending, roughly a third of the TPU lease. Taken together, Broadcom is either the guarantor, the direct lender or both on around $102 billion of financing, a figure close to its entire annual revenue.
The deal reflects how the financing of AI has outgrown the venture capital that used to carry it. A chipmaker is now also a banker, underwriting the equipment its customers cannot afford to buy outright. The risk and the product are, as one analyst put it, now bound together in a single instrument. If Anthropic’s revenue grows as expected, everyone gets paid. If the model business falters, Broadcom holds the residual value of chips whose worth depends on a market that has not yet been tested through a downturn.
The pattern is spreading. Nvidia has built lending platforms with Apollo, BlackRock and others to move more than $500 billion into AI infrastructure, and Apollo has financed chips for Musk’s xAI. The Broadcom deal is the same logic applied at larger scale: turn a chip sale into a bond, and let the credit markets carry a cost that once fell entirely on a startup’s venture investors.
The residual-value guarantee is the part that makes bankers pause. It means Broadcom has promised to make lenders whole if the chips, once leased, turn out to be worth less than the debt against them. In a market where a faster chip can make last year’s model obsolete within months, that promise moves a risk that used to sit with the customer onto the supplier’s balance sheet. Broadcom is betting that its own products will hold value long enough for the arithmetic to work, and whether that bet holds will depend on how fast it and Nvidia keep shipping newer hardware.
For Anthropic, the package is a bet on continued growth at a moment when it is trying to convince public investors of exactly that. The company has raised money at a pace that once seemed reserved for the most aggressive startups, and its chip commitments now run into the hundreds of billions of dollars. The syndication spreads that risk across Wall Street, with Broadcom’s name doing much of the convincing.
For Broadcom, the stakes are equally large. The company has built one of the most profitable franchises in AI silicon, and this deal ties its balance sheet to the customer that buys it. Analysts said the transaction cements Broadcom’s position at the center of the AI chip economy, but it also means a slowdown at Anthropic would land on Broadcom’s books in a way that a simple supplier relationship never would. The chipmaker is no longer just selling the chips; it is underwriting the bet.
