Broadcom to lend Anthropic up to $42 billion to lease chips, IPO filing says

Broadcom has agreed to lend Anthropic up to $42 billion to finance infrastructure spending, according to Anthropic’s IPO prospectus, Reuters reported exclusively on October 1. The relationship spans compute supply, equipment leasing, and financing, giving the chipmaker a central role in Anthropic’s infrastructure buildout beyond cloud partners such as Amazon.

As part of the arrangement, Broadcom could designate a financing partner, and the debt instruments could convert into Anthropic shares. Anthropic said it does not expect any notes to be sold before the IPO completes. The convertible facility could finance about a third of Anthropic’s $125.2 billion five-year lease commitment for tensor processing unit capacity. Alphabet’s Google and Broadcom collaborate on TPUs; Anthropic announced in April an expanded partnership with Broadcom and Google for multi-gigawatt next-generation TPU capacity beginning in 2027.

Anthropic is expected to become Broadcom’s largest compute customer in 2027. Broadcom projects AI semiconductor revenue of about $115 billion in fiscal 2027 and about $230 billion in fiscal 2028. “It feels that there’s quite a concentrated bet right now on two companies being able to generate enough revenues to support all the financing that’s happened,” Robert Leitao, managing partner of Rothschild & Co., told Reuters. Seaport Research analyst Jay Goldberg said Nvidia has put a massive amount of its balance sheet behind chip sales and Broadcom is having to follow suit.

The prospectus discloses that Broadcom’s dual role supplying hardware and acting as a financing partner creates “potential conflicts of interest” that might affect Anthropic’s ability to access the compute it needs, and that Broadcom’s pricing and hardware decisions could affect procurement. Related to the convertible debt, Anthropic deposited cash into a restricted account for Broadcom’s benefit in April 2026; certain payment or performance defaults could make a substantial portion of lease obligations immediately due while limiting use of the $42 billion facility. Broadcom did not comment. Anthropic declined to comment. Reuters framed Anthropic’s public offering as one that could see the lab valued at $2 trillion.

The filing sits beside Anthropic’s other infrastructure and capital milestones covered here, including an IPO prospectus that warns advanced AI may pose existential risks, an $11.6 billion seven-year Akamai cloud deal, and a roughly $45 billion Nscale West Virginia compute pact. The FTC has also opened a probe into Anthropic and OpenAI over consumer AI risks.

Broadcom to lend Anthropic up to $42 billion to lease chips, IPO filing says

Sources