Banks Put Up $63B for Anthropic's Broadcom Chips — Broadcom Guarantees the Gear

The deal#

Four of the biggest names in finance — Bank of America, Blackstone, Citi and Morgan Stanley — announced $63 billion of committed financing on Monday to put Broadcom's AI chips into Anthropic's hands. The money does not go to Anthropic directly. A newly formed special purpose vehicle (SPV) will use it to buy Broadcom XPU accelerators and networking equipment, then lease the hardware to the Claude maker. Deliveries are expected to start in calendar 2027, under the strategic compute capacity agreement Broadcom and Anthropic announced previously.

The structure is layered. Bank of America, Citi and Morgan Stanley are arranging the first-lien (senior) debt; Blackstone is the sole provider of the committed portion of the second-lien financing, which ranks below the senior debt. Reuters, citing two people familiar with the matter, put the first-lien portion at about $43.5 billion — roughly 69 percent of the package. The joint release did not disclose the split.

Broadcom's real role: seller and guarantor#

Broadcom is not lending the money. It is doing something more interesting. Alongside selling the chips, Broadcom is providing "residual value support" to the vehicle in an amount equal to the first-lien portion of the financing. In plain terms: if the AI hardware is worth less than the senior debt when it comes due, Broadcom covers the gap. The chipmaker is guaranteeing the resale value of its own gear so that banks will lend against it at this scale.

That guarantee is the deal's center of gravity. AI accelerators are new, fast-depreciating assets with no deep second-hand market, and $63 billion is a lot of exposure against them. Broadcom's backstop converts an equipment loan into something closer to a Broadcom credit — which is what makes the financing placeable.

The machine behind Anthropic's $265.6 billion#

The SPV is best understood as the funding mechanism behind numbers Anthropic disclosed the same day in its S-1 filing. As our breakdown of Anthropic's compute deals shows, the company's minimum compute commitments rose from $54.6 billion to $265.6 billion in six months. Its Broadcom equipment leases alone carry about $161.2 billion of rent, excluding interest, and Broadcom separately agreed to lend Anthropic up to $42 billion in convertible notes at 9 percent paid-in-kind interest — solely so Anthropic can pay the rent on Broadcom hardware.

Monday's vehicle is how a slice of that obligation gets financed without the debt sitting on Anthropic's own balance sheet ahead of its IPO: banks own the claim, the SPV owns the chips, Anthropic pays quarterly rent, and Broadcom stands behind the hardware's value.

The take#

The AI buildout has reached the stage where the financing is the story. A year ago, compute was bought with cash flow. Monday alone brought a $63 billion chip SPV for Anthropic, a roughly $40 billion Apollo chip-leasing deal for SpaceX, and Meta's planned $95 billion equity raise — three different structures, one driver: AI infrastructure now absorbs capital faster than even the largest technology companies generate it.

For Broadcom, the trade is attractive and concentrated at once. It books the chip sales, earns a strategic lock on Anthropic's capacity buildout, and in exchange absorbs the residual-value risk on tens of billions of dollars of its own silicon. Shares rose about 1.3 percent in after-hours trading Monday. The risk to watch is stacking: each additional structure like this one adds another layer of Broadcom's balance sheet underneath the AI boom it is selling into.

Figures for the first-lien/second-lien split are as reported by Reuters from two sources familiar with the matter; the joint release did not disclose them. Not investment advice. This brief's cover image is AI-generated.