Broadcom has spent the past several months selling custom chips to companies that intend to build the largest computing clusters ever assembled. It has also, according to reports, been arranging the borrowing that lets those customers afford them.
Crypto Briefing reported on October 14 that the company is working on large debt packages tied to customer purchases of custom silicon and the facilities needed to run it. The largest centers on Anthropic, with a package of roughly $60 billion, divided into about $42 billion of senior secured debt and about $18 billion of subordinated debt led by Blackstone. A second set of talks involves OpenAI, covering $30 billion to $50 billion, and those discussions remain preliminary. If both proceed, the combined commitments would exceed $92 billion.
The structure is a familiar one by now. Broadcom set up an AI financing platform with Apollo and Blackstone in June, and the first $35 billion transaction went to Anthropic. What has changed is the size. A single customer’s borrowing package is now larger than the annual revenue of most companies in the semiconductor industry, and it exists because the customers buying the chips do not generate enough cash to pay for them at the speed they want to build.
The arrangement serves each party differently. Broadcom books orders without carrying the customer’s credit exposure on its own balance sheet, since the borrowing sits with the customer. Anthropic and OpenAI gain access to hardware they could not otherwise buy at the pace their model development requires. The lenders earn yields that reflect a risk they are pricing by hand, because there is no long history of data center leases and chip purchase agreements to model against.
That the money is being raised at all is a statement about the demand. That it is being raised now, in this form, is also a statement about the alternative. Neither company has meaningfully more equity to spend, and equity investors spent this week demonstrating what they think of additional issuance. Broadcom’s position as the chip designer makes it the origin of the orders, and its willingness to help finance them makes it the origin of the credit as well.
Investors reading the reports had a template available. CoreWeave, whose business model depends on similar borrowing, closed down 15.5 percent on October 14. Its notes maturing in 2032 traded below 80 cents on the dollar with yields above 15 percent, and market pricing implied a better-than-even chance of default within five years. Gil Luria of D.A. Davidson called it the subprime tranche of the AI trade. The Anthropic package’s senior portion is secured and its junior portion is not, which is a distinction the CoreWeave market has spent the week learning to price.
Analysts said the split between senior and junior debt in the Anthropic package reflects an attempt to widen the buyer base. Insurance companies and pension funds can hold the secured piece. The subordinate tranche, led by a private credit manager, absorbs losses first in exchange for a higher coupon. That division of labor has become standard in infrastructure finance and is now being applied to artificial intelligence hardware.
The timing sits awkwardly against the rest of the week. Barclays downgraded Dell, HPE and NetApp on the argument that enterprise adoption of artificial intelligence is arriving later than the stocks assumed, and the selling spread from servers to chips within a day. Broadcom’s financing work is evidence of the opposite case at the level of the largest buyers. Both can be true, since the companies borrowing tens of billions are not the same customers whose technology budgets were being marked down.
There is also the question of what the lenders are actually underwriting. A data center built for a specific customer’s workloads has limited alternative uses. The chips inside it are custom designs that run that customer’s models and little else. If the customer’s business changes, the collateral does not adapt. The senior secured claim in the Anthropic package is secured against assets whose value depends on Anthropic continuing to exist as a going concern, which is a different kind of security than a rail network or an office tower.
Neither Broadcom nor the private credit managers have disclosed the terms, and none of the parties has said publicly how the borrowing is structured across maturities, what covenants it carries, or what happens if the customer’s orders slow. The reported figures come from people familiar with the arrangements, and the OpenAI talks remain at an early stage, which means the final numbers could change or the deals could not happen at all.
What the reports establish is that delivering custom chips at this scale has become a capital markets business as much as an engineering one. Broadcom designs the silicon, and it is helping to assemble the money that buys it. The customers who cannot fund their own expansion have found a supplier willing to bring the lenders to the table.
For the market, the practical question is whether the debt gets repaid from the revenue the chips generate. Anthropic reported third-quarter revenue of $16.8 billion, up from $11.6 billion in the second quarter and $4.7 billion in the first, and said it was profitable on an adjusted basis with positive cash flow. The Financial Times calculated that it returns $1.70 of revenue for every $1 of computing cost.
A borrower whose revenue is growing that quickly can service a $60 billion package, provided the growth continues. The financing packages are, in the end, a bet that it does, placed by lenders who have no customer relationship with the models being trained and no ability to slow the spending if the answer turns out to be different.
