Broadcom is in the market for one of the largest corporate borrowings ever assembled, and almost none of it will show up on its balance sheet. The chipmaker is in talks with lenders to raise more than $60 billion in senior secured debt to fund a chip financing arrangement benefiting Anthropic and other AI companies, Bloomberg reported Thursday, with a roughly $30 billion junior tranche potentially stacked on top — a structure that could push the total to as much as $100 billion. By Friday, CNBC was reporting that the deal was being marketed at $70 billion to $80 billion, with lenders targeting a senior tranche of about $45 billion and a junior tranche near $35 billion. The figures, according to both outlets, are still moving.
The money would flow through special-purpose vehicles rather than Broadcom itself. The SPVs buy the AI racks built around Broadcom's custom accelerators, the labs lease them, and Broadcom guarantees a portion of the lease payments. It is the architecture the company used in June, at roughly triple the scale — and credit markets have begun pricing what happens if it keeps growing.
The template that started in June
On June 9, Broadcom announced the AI XPV Platform with Apollo Global Management and Blackstone's credit and insurance business as anchor investors, launching with a $35 billion tranche led by Apollo. The stated design goal is more than 20 gigawatts of compute capacity through 2028 for frontier labs including Anthropic and OpenAI. The first deployment covers more than 1 gigawatt for Anthropic at Fluidstack sites beginning in mid-2026.
"We are at a historic inflection point where the demand for AI compute is fundamentally reshaping the global economic landscape," Hock Tan, Broadcom's president and CEO, said in announcing the platform. The structure, he added, "synchronizes the world's most sophisticated capital with Broadcom's advanced technological roadmap to meet this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity by enabling our rapidly scaling customers, starting with Anthropic, to realize their most ambitious AI visions with speed and certainty."
Jim Zelter, Apollo's president, framed the same transaction from the lender's side. "The sheer scale of the global AI opportunity requires a bold, collaborative model," he said. "Our investment in this Platform reflects our conviction in Broadcom's technology leadership and Anthropic's frontier roadmap. We are proud to deliver the capital foundation that allows this ecosystem to scale efficiently." Blackstone president Jon Gray called the compute build-out "an unprecedented opportunity to invest at scale across the AI infrastructure ecosystem."
Both firms are reportedly in talks to participate in the new raise. Between them they manage more than $2.3 trillion. None of the three companies has commented publicly on the new financing.
What Broadcom has actually signed
The gap between headline numbers and committed liability is where this story gets contested. Broadcom's most recent 10-Q describes a June 8 arrangement in which an investor partner assumed rack purchase agreements and the related customer leases, with Broadcom backstopping lease payments over five-year terms. That backstop grows as racks deploy and shrinks as the customer pays. It caps at $29 billion.
Bank of America went further. In a note earlier this month, the bank reportedly downgraded Broadcom's bonds to market weight and modeled the platform scaling to its full 20-gigawatt design — arriving at roughly $370 billion in financing by mid-2029, much of it Broadcom-guaranteed. The same analysis reportedly put losses at about $42 billion if every customer defaulted at once, and roughly $10.5 billion at a 25% default rate.
The market reaction has been unambiguous. Broadcom shares fell 5.9% on August 14, closing near $393, about 21% below their 52-week high of $495. On Friday, Broadcom's credit default swap spread hit a record 122 basis points — the cost of insuring against default at a company whose fiscal second-quarter net income, for the period ended May 3, was $9.3 billion, up 88% year over year on revenue of $22.2 billion.
Why It Matters
Broadcom is now financing the demand for its own chips, and doing it at a scale that makes the distinction between vendor and lender increasingly theoretical. The company expects AI chip revenue above $100 billion in fiscal 2027 — more than its total revenue in any prior year — with Anthropic reportedly accounting for more than 40% of it. That revenue depends on labs that do not generate the cash to buy $100 billion of silicon outright. So Broadcom guarantees the leases that let them lease it instead.
This is not unprecedented. Vendor financing built the telecom boom of the late 1990s, and it is the mechanism most often cited when that boom is described as a bubble. What is new is the plumbing: private credit funds, insurance balance sheets, and SPVs designed to keep the obligation off the manufacturer's books while leaving the manufacturer holding the residual risk. The chips are collateral, which sounds reassuring until you ask what a fleet of two-year-old custom accelerators is worth in a market where demand has cooled.
The concentration risk is the sharper point. Broadcom's guarantees, Anthropic's compute expansion, and Apollo's and Blackstone's credit deployments are all bets on the same variable: that AI inference demand keeps compounding through 2029. If it does, the structure is elegant. If it does not, the counterparties discover they were never diversified.
What to Watch
Three things. First, where the tranches price — the gap between Bloomberg's $60 billion to $70 billion senior figure and CNBC's $45 billion suggests lenders are pushing back on how much senior paper the market will absorb, and the final split between guaranteed and unguaranteed debt will show what investors think Broadcom's backstop is worth. Second, Broadcom's next 10-Q: the $29 billion cap covers only the first transaction, and each deal structured the same way adds to it. Third, whether the CDS spread retreats or keeps climbing. At 122 basis points, credit markets are charging a record premium on a company posting 88% profit growth. One of those two signals is wrong.
“We are at a historic inflection point where the demand for AI compute is fundamentally reshaping the global economic landscape.”— Hock Tan, President and CEO, Broadcom