Broadcom Wants $60B+ in Debt to Build AI Chips for Anthropic — a Deal That Could Reach $100B
Broadcom is in talks with lenders for a senior-secured tranche of $60–70B plus roughly $30B in junior debt to finance custom AI silicon for Anthropic and other customers. Blackstone and Apollo are at the table.
Broadcom is talking to lenders about raising more than $60 billion in debt to finance an AI chip deal tied to customers including Anthropic — and the full structure under discussion could reach $100 billion. Per Bloomberg’s reporting, the package includes a senior-secured tranche of roughly $60–70 billion, which Broadcom would partially guarantee, plus a junior tranche of around $30 billion.
Blackstone and Apollo Global Management are in talks to participate. That’s not a coincidence: the three companies launched an AI XPU financing platform together in June with an initial scale of about $35 billion, primarily aimed at helping Anthropic build AI data centers. Two months later, the platform’s successor is being sized at nearly triple that.
The purpose is custom silicon. Broadcom designs the XPU accelerators that hyperscalers and AI labs use as an alternative to Nvidia GPUs — Google’s TPUs being the flagship example. Anthropic has been aggressively diversifying its compute stack across TPUs, and custom Broadcom-designed parts are the logical next layer. Financing that silicon requires capital on a scale the chip industry has never carried on its own balance sheets.
That’s the real story here: AI infrastructure has formally moved into the debt markets, structured like energy or telecom megaprojects. Equity rounds and cash flow no longer cover the bill. Nvidia is backstopping $105 billion for OpenAI’s Ohio data center; Broadcom is now assembling up to $100 billion in structured debt for the Anthropic side of the ledger. Private credit giants — Apollo, Blackstone — are becoming the de facto banks of the AI buildout.
The risk math deserves scrutiny. Senior-secured debt against chips implies the chips are the collateral, and AI accelerators depreciate fast — a rack of leading-edge silicon is worth dramatically less in three years. The lenders are effectively underwriting a bet that AI demand keeps outrunning supply long enough for the assets to pay themselves off. If that bet holds, this structure gets replicated everywhere. If it doesn’t, this is where the leverage lives.
For Broadcom, the upside is straightforward: it locks in multi-year custom-silicon revenue from the fastest-growing AI lab on the planet without carrying the financing risk alone. Its stock jumped on the reports. For Anthropic — reportedly at roughly $65 billion in annualized revenue and preparing an IPO filing — guaranteed access to non-Nvidia compute is a strategic moat, not just a cost line.
Watch for the final structure. If the $100 billion figure closes, it would be one of the largest debt financings in tech history — assembled for chips that don’t exist yet.