Broadcom has agreed to lend Anthropic up to $42B to finance the AI lab's custom chip lease commitments, according to Anthropic's confidential IPO prospectus.
The facility funds leases on tensor processing units that Broadcom co-develops with Google. Anthropic has committed to $125.2B in TPU lease costs over the next five years. The Broadcom loan could cover roughly a third of that bill.
The terms let Broadcom convert debt instruments into Anthropic shares, turning a supplier contract into a potential equity stake.
Broadcom has already received cash deposits in restricted accounts tied to the agreement.
The supplier is also the lender
Anthropic's own filing flags the arrangement, citing "potential conflicts of interest" from Broadcom's dual role as hardware supplier and financier. Anthropic is expected to become Broadcom's largest compute customer by 2027.
That makes the chipmaker's revenue forecast partly a function of credit it extends itself. Broadcom projects AI semiconductor revenues of $230B by fiscal 2028.
The playbook mirrors Nvidia's, which has used its balance sheet to underwrite demand for its own silicon.
Broadcom had been building toward this. Reports from August 2026 described a financing package exceeding $60B assembled with Blackstone and Apollo under an internal XPV platform, aimed at bridging the capital gap for AI labs. Broadcom's credit risk rose slightly during those negotiations.
The commitments cannot be cancelled
The loan sits inside a far larger obligation. Anthropic's prospectus lays out $518B in infrastructure spending over the next decade. Of that, $161.2B covers Broadcom-related equipment lease obligations that are largely non-cancellable.
Anthropic is shifting away from a cloud-only model toward owning more of its dedicated data center capacity. The filing also flags the triple role played by Google, Amazon, and Microsoft as investors, suppliers, and competitors at once.
If Anthropic's commercial growth tracks its spending plan, the circularity resolves itself. If it doesn't, Broadcom holds both the unpaid leases and the equity conversion that was supposed to compensate for the risk.
The IPO prospectus remains confidential, so the final terms could still change before Anthropic lists.
