AI in action · Markets
Banks Put $63 Billion Behind Broadcom Chips for Anthropic
Bank of America, Citi, Morgan Stanley and Blackstone will lend $63 billion so a special vehicle can buy Broadcom AI chips and lease them to Anthropic. Broadcom backstops the senior part of the debt.
On Monday, October 26, the same day Anthropic made its IPO filing public, four financial firms committed $63 billion to pay for the hardware the company will run on, Reuters reported. A newly formed special purpose vehicle will buy Broadcom's custom AI accelerators and networking equipment and lease them to Anthropic, with deliveries expected to start in 2027 under a compute agreement the two companies had already announced. Reuters described it as one of the largest debt deals tied to the AI build-out so far.
The money is stacked in layers. Bank of America, Citigroup and Morgan Stanley are arranging the first-lien loans, the safest slice, which two people familiar with the deal put at about $43.5 billion, or 69% of the total; the release itself did not break the figure out. Blackstone is the sole provider of the committed second-lien financing, which is repaid only after the senior lenders. Broadcom adds what the companies call residual value support for an amount equal to the first-lien portion: in effect, a promise to cover lenders if the chips are worth less than expected when the leases run out.
The structure is not new, only bigger. Apollo and Blackstone had already agreed to finance a $35 billion expansion of Anthropic's computing capacity with Broadcom, which committed a backstop of up to $29 billion in that earlier deal, according to a filing cited by Reuters. In August, Bloomberg reported that Broadcom was sounding out lenders for more than $60 billion and that the total could eventually approach $100 billion, so further tranches are possible.
Moody's called Broadcom "one of the strongest large technology companies" but warned, as summarised by Reuters, that the risk would grow if several transactions of this kind were stacked up over a short period to meet the funding needs of frontier AI labs. That is the point for anyone holding the chipmaker's shares or bonds: the guarantee does not appear as debt on Broadcom's balance sheet, yet it ties part of the company's credit to the resale value of AI chips years from now.
Investors took the deal well on day one. Broadcom's shares rose 4% on Tuesday, according to Al Jazeera, as chip stocks led the Nasdaq higher. Whether that holds will depend less on the headline figure than on a question the leases leave open: how fast a chip delivered in 2027 loses its value once newer ones arrive.
Sources: Reuters via KFGO — Wall Street banks, Blackstone line up $63 billion to finance Broadcom AI chips for Anthropic (Oct 26, 2026); The Next Web — Broadcom seeks more than $60bn in debt to fund AI chips for Anthropic (Aug 21, 2026), citing Bloomberg; Al Jazeera — Global stock markets rise as investors continue to bet on AI (Oct 28, 2026)