The structure is a landlord’s. Someone else owns the building, the tenant pays rent, and the company that made the equipment stands behind its value when the lease ends.
On Monday, Broadcom said a group of four financial institutions had completed $63 billion of financing through a newly created special purpose entity, which will buy Broadcom’s XPU accelerators and networking equipment and lease it to Anthropic. Bank of America, Citigroup and Morgan Stanley arranged the first-lien portion. Blackstone was the sole provider of the second-lien commitment.
Broadcom is not lending the money. It is guaranteeing part of the collateral. The company agreed to provide residual value support equal to the first-lien amount, meaning that if Anthropic defaults and the equipment sells for less than the banks are owed, Broadcom absorbs the difference up to that limit.
That guarantee is the most interesting term in the transaction. A chipmaker is underwriting the resale value of its own silicon, in a market where the resale value of a two-year-old accelerator is an open question. Nvidia’s H100 chips, which traded near $40,000 at the peak of the shortage, have been quoted at less than half that on secondary markets this year.
Deliveries are expected to begin in 2027. The financing forms part of the compute agreement the two companies announced previously, under which Anthropic committed to buy custom accelerators built to its own design rather than Nvidia’s general-purpose parts.
Anthropic’s decision to design its own chip is a familiar move among large model developers. Google has built TPUs for a decade, Amazon has Trainium and Inferentia, and Meta has commissioned its own accelerators. The logic is cost: a model developer that buys enough compute can justify the engineering expense of a bespoke part, and can strip out functions it does not need.
Broadcom’s business is building those parts for other companies. Its custom silicon unit, assembled largely through the acquisition of VMware’s networking assets and a decade of work for Google, now counts among its customers Meta, Google and, through this agreement, Anthropic.
Reuters described the transaction as among the largest AI-related debt financings on record, and the comparison it invites is to vendor financing during the telecom buildout of the late 1990s. Lucent and Nortel lent to carriers that bought their equipment, booked the revenue immediately, and discovered years later that the loans were uncollectible. Both companies wrote off billions.
The differences are worth noting. Lucent lent cash. Broadcom is providing a residual value guarantee, which is a contingent obligation rather than a transfer of funds, and the debt sits with banks and private credit funds that priced it themselves. Broadcom’s exposure is capped at the first-lien amount and triggered only by a default plus a shortfall.
The similarity is also worth noting. In both cases the equipment supplier’s revenue depends on a customer’s ability to pay, and the supplier has taken steps to make that customer financeable. A guarantee that helps a customer borrow is a guarantee that helps the supplier sell.
Private credit is doing the work that banks once did. The second-lien tranche, taken entirely by Blackstone, is the kind of subordinated risk that regulated banks have largely stopped holding. Insurance companies, pension funds and dedicated credit vehicles now supply it, at spreads well above investment grade.
Anthropic’s own finances will determine how this is judged. The company filed to go public on October 26, disclosing first-half revenue of $16.29 billion against a net loss of $80.75 billion, most of it an accounting charge on convertible instruments. It also disclosed $542 billion to $567 billion of future compute and infrastructure commitments, which do not shrink if usage falls short.
Those commitments are the reason the financing exists in this form. A company that has promised to pay for capacity whether or not it uses it needs the capacity delivered, and a supplier that wants the order needs the buyer to have the money. The special purpose entity is the mechanism that squares the two.
Broadcom’s shareholders will watch the guarantee line in the filings rather than the revenue line. Contingent obligations of this size do not appear as debt, and rating agencies treat them as a claim on liquidity. A single $63 billion facility is manageable against Broadcom’s cash flow. Several would change how the company is valued.
The accounting treatment matters for how the deal is read. A lease of this kind is an operating commitment for Anthropic and a sale for Broadcom, which books revenue as equipment ships rather than as rent arrives over a decade. That timing difference is why vendors prefer the structure: the income statement looks better in the year of delivery than it would under a straightforward loan.
For the market, the transaction sets a template. If chips can be financed like aircraft, leased to operators and securitized against future cash flows, the constraint on AI capacity stops being the supplier’s balance sheet and becomes the buyer’s credit. That is a larger change than any single order, and it is the one the four banks and Blackstone have now priced.
