The Broadcom Anthropic 63 billion deal announced late Monday will finance a massive purchase of Broadcom AI chips for Anthropic, in what the Wall Street Journal calls the largest AI debt deal ever arranged. Bank of America, Blackstone, Citi and Morgan Stanley will provide $63 billion in financing through a newly formed special purpose vehicle, which will buy Broadcom XPU accelerators and networking equipment and lease them to Anthropic.

The deal landed hours after Anthropic publicly filed for its initial public offering on Monday, and it almost did not happen at all. According to the Journal, banks spent the weekend threatening to walk away before Broadcom chief executive Hock Tan intervened with last minute concessions to save it.

What Was Announced

Under the structure described in a joint statement on Monday, the new vehicle will use committed financing from the four firms to buy Broadcom hardware, then lease it to Anthropic. Deliveries are expected to begin in 2027 as part of a previously announced strategic compute capacity agreement between Broadcom and Anthropic, the companies said.

Bank of America, Citi and Morgan Stanley are arranging the first lien financing, the senior debt that gets repaid first. Blackstone will provide the committed portion of the second lien financing, which ranks below it. The statement did not disclose how the $63 billion splits between the two layers, but Reuters reported, citing two sources familiar with the matter, that the first lien loans total about $43.5 billion, or 69 percent of the financing.

Broadcom Is Also the Backstop

Broadcom is not only the seller in this deal. The chipmaker is providing “residual value support” to the senior lenders, effectively agreeing to absorb declines in the value of the hardware up to an amount equal to the first lien debt. Reuters described the commitment as a significant guarantee inside the financing structure.

The arrangement is not Broadcom’s first. Apollo and Blackstone had already agreed to finance a $35 billion expansion of Anthropic’s AI computing capacity under a prior agreement with Broadcom, with Broadcom’s backstop in that deal reaching up to $29 billion, according to a filing cited by Reuters. Moody’s has described Broadcom as one of the strongest large technology companies, while warning that the risk would grow if several such transactions were undertaken over a short period to meet the funding needs of frontier AI labs.

The deal at a glance
Graphic: GPTOnline, using Broadcom assets

An 11th Hour Rescue

The Journal reported on Tuesday that the deal, known inside the talks as “Project North Star”, nearly collapsed over the weekend. Broadcom’s Tan had spent nearly two months trying to get banks to commit more than $40 billion to what would become the largest AI debt deal in history. With interest rates rising and lenders worried about overexposure to AI ventures, some banks felt they were not being paid enough for the risk and considered pulling out.

Tan held 11th hour talks with bank executives over the weekend and agreed to higher interest rates on the loans, along with stronger guarantees to protect lenders if Anthropic defaults. The deal was announced late Monday, after Anthropic released its IPO filing. Another chunk of debt, partly financed by Blackstone, brought total commitments to $63 billion.

“Fundamentally, the need for AI compute continues to grow at an extraordinary pace,” Tan said. “This validates that there is capital available to finance such growth and that Broadcom is uniquely positioned to enable it.”

Why lenders almost walked away
Graphic: GPTOnline, using Broadcom assets

Why It Matters

The financing shows how the AI buildout is now being paid for. Anthropic, which filed its S-1 on Monday and aims to list on Nasdaq under the ticker ANT, reported $16.3 billion in revenue for the first half of 2026 alongside an $80.7 billion net loss driven largely by accounting charges. Buying the compute it needs outright would strain any balance sheet, so the company is renting it instead, with its suppliers and lenders carrying much of the risk.

It also fits a pattern across the industry that the Journal’s Ben Dummett, speaking on the newspaper’s What’s News podcast, called an extreme example of circular financing. “This represents an extreme example of a new type of financing that has emerged as a result of the growth in the AI sector,” he said. “You have a situation here where suppliers of chips like Broadcom are also on the other end and making huge equity or debt commitments to the Anthropics of the world that are buying these chips.”

The same pattern is visible in Meta’s fundraising. Meta plans to raise up to $95 billion for AI infrastructure, and its chip suppliers are buying in: Nvidia is investing $3 billion in Meta’s offering, while AMD announced on Tuesday that it will invest $1 billion. For Anthropic, the stakes are higher still. If its public debut disappoints, Dummett warned, “that’s going to really undermine both sides of the equation.”

Sources