On Monday, Oct. 26, the same day Anthropic filed to go public, four Wall Street firms announced a $63 billion deal to fund the AI chips the San Francisco company will run on.
How the deal works
- A newly formed special purpose vehicle will buy Broadcom XPU AI accelerators and networking equipment and lease them to Anthropic.
- Bank of America, Citi and Morgan Stanley are arranging the first-lien, or senior, financing. Blackstone is the sole provider of the committed second-lien portion.
- Broadcom is providing residual value support equal to the first-lien amount. Reuters described this as effectively a significant guarantee.
- Deliveries are expected to begin in calendar 2027, under a compute agreement Broadcom announced earlier.
Reuters, citing two people familiar with the matter, reported that the first-lien loans total about $43.5 billion, or 69% of the financing. Reuters called it one of the largest debt deals tied to the AI buildout. In an earlier agreement, Apollo and Blackstone agreed to finance a $35 billion expansion of Anthropic's computing capacity, with a Broadcom backstop of up to $29 billion.
"This validates that there is capital available to finance such growth and that Broadcom is uniquely positioned to enable it," Broadcom CEO Hock Tan said. Blackstone President Jon Gray said the growing demand for AI "is creating an enormous opportunity to finance compute capacity at scale." Reuters noted that Moody's has warned the risk would rise if several such deals were done in a short period to meet frontier AI labs' funding needs.
Market reaction
CNBC reported that AI infrastructure stocks climbed Tuesday, helped by improved sentiment after Anthropic's IPO filing and the Broadcom financing. Nebius rose 11%, Astera Labs 9%, and Western Digital and Bloom Energy 8%.