Broadcom Lines Up a $100 Billion AI Debt Machine — and Anthropic Is the First Customer

Broadcom is negotiating one of the largest private debt raises in corporate history. According to a Bloomberg report published August 20, citing people with knowledge of the matter, the chip designer is in talks with a group of lenders to raise more than $60 billion in debt for an AI chip financing deal that will benefit Anthropic and other companies — with the total potentially reaching $100 billion once junior tranches are included.

The structure under discussion, according to the sources, would see a special-purpose vehicle issue a senior-secured tranche of roughly $60–70 billion, of which Broadcom would guarantee a portion, alongside a junior debt tranche of about $30 billion. The financing may also be rolled out incrementally rather than all at once, and talks are ongoing — details may change. Spokespeople for Broadcom and Anthropic declined to comment, as did representatives for Apollo and Blackstone.

The deal that came before

This is not Broadcom’s first trip to the private credit well. In June, the company struck a three-way partnership with Apollo Global Management and Blackstone to finance a $35 billion expansion of Anthropic’s computing capacity using Broadcom’s custom chips and networking gear. That initial commitment was expected to add one gigawatt of computing capacity, while the partnership — branded the AI XPV platform — aims to enable more than 20 gigawatts of compute power for leading AI labs by 2028.

The mechanics of that first deal explain why lenders are willing to play at this scale. Broadcom backstopped most of the $35 billion debt, and investors including Apollo and Blackstone financed the purchase of custom AI chips to lease to Anthropic. Because Broadcom’s guarantee sat behind the paper, the senior tranches won investment-grade ratings at lower borrowing costs — a template the new, far larger deal could replicate. Blackstone and Apollo are again in talks to participate, following the June partnership.

Reaching the partnership’s 20-gigawatt goal will require hundreds of billions of dollars — a level of capacity that would roughly equal the output of 20 nuclear plants.

Why Anthropic needs someone else’s balance sheet

AI labs are taking a bigger role in the build-out of computing infrastructure, aiming to ensure they have enough capacity for training and inference. But Anthropic, which raised $65 billion in private funding in May at a $965 billion valuation, cannot simply buy chips outright without straining even its record-setting war chest. Leasing compute financed by third-party vehicles keeps the capital expenditure off the lab’s books while locking in supply — and gives Broadcom a captive customer for its custom silicon and networking products.

Broadcom, for its part, is challenging Nvidia’s dominance in the AI data center market. The company designs custom chips for Alphabet and Meta as tech giants look to reduce their reliance on Nvidia, and it has chip supply deals with both Anthropic and OpenAI. CEO Hock Tan said in March that he expects AI chip sales to top $100 billion next year. Other partnerships reinforce the trajectory: an accord with Apple expected to be worth more than $30 billion, and a reported $200 billion foundry partnership with Samsung Electronics to manufacture its AI chips.

The market read the news as good for Broadcom regardless of the debt involved: after briefly declining, shares rose as much as 1.1% in late trading after Bloomberg’s report. The stock had climbed 5.2% this year through the close.

The AI debt wave, in context

The Broadcom negotiation is the latest and largest entry in a rapidly growing ledger of novel AI financing deals — a wave that has unnerved some investors even as it funds the build-out. The same week, the Wall Street Journal tallied roughly $3 trillion in off-balance-sheet AI commitments across nine US tech giants, about five times their reported capital expenditure. Earlier in August, Nvidia announced a coalition of major financial firms — including BlackRock and Goldman Sachs — lining up more than $500 billion to help fund the AI build-out. And earlier this month, Blackstone was already pitching a $36 billion follow-on debt deal for Anthropic’s Google-chip procurement, on top of the $35 billion closed in June.

There is a bull case and a bear case, and they share the same numbers. Bulls argue that investment-grade-rated SPV structures let hyperscalers and labs fund productive assets without diluting shareholders or crowding out balance sheets, with chip demand effectively guaranteeing lease revenue. Bears counter that circularity is creeping in — the same handful of private credit giants financing chips that are sold to customers whose valuations depend on the compute those chips provide. Bank of America analysts estimated in mid-August that Broadcom’s off-balance-sheet AI chip-financing vehicle could accumulate roughly $370 billion in senior debt by mid-2029, a note that knocked 6% off the stock in a day.

What happens next is straightforward to watch: whether the senior tranche prices with investment-grade ratings like the June deal did, and whether the incremental rollout hits its first milestones. If it does, expect the AI XPV template — vendor backstop, SPV issuance, private credit funding, lab as anchor tenant — to become the standard way frontier compute gets financed. If it stumbles, the market will have found the ceiling of the AI debt experiment in real time.