If you were wondering how anyone pays for the AI buildout, Monday offered a clear answer. Bank of America, Citi, Morgan Stanley, and Blackstone announced a $63 billion financing package centred on Broadcom hardware, with Anthropic as the end user.
The setup is a bit unusual. A new special-purpose company will buy Broadcom's custom XPU AI accelerators and networking gear, then lease all of it to Anthropic. Deliveries are expected to start in 2027. The three banks are arranging the senior, first-lien part of the debt, which Reuters put at about $43.5 billion. Blackstone is the only committed lender on the riskier second-lien layer.
Here's the detail that makes lenders comfortable: Broadcom itself is backing the deal. It's providing residual value support to the special-purpose company equal to the first-lien debt. In plain terms, if the hardware ends up worth less than expected, the chipmaker is standing behind it, not just the banks.
Getting it done wasn't easy, either. The Wall Street Journal reports that Broadcom CEO Hock Tan spent close to two months trying to line up more than $40 billion in bank commitments and stepped in personally to close what the paper calls the largest AI debt deal ever. In the announcement, Tan said demand for AI compute keeps growing at an extraordinary pace and that the deal shows the capital is there to fund it.
Why it matters: AI labs need enormous amounts of hardware, and paying cash upfront doesn't scale. Deals like this turn chips into leasable assets that banks and private credit can finance, much like aircraft or real estate. Expect more of them. Expect more debates about how much risk is building up underneath the AI boom, too.