Broadcom Will Lend Anthropic Up to $42 Billion to Lease the AI Chips Broadcom Itself Sells

Broadcom has agreed to lend Anthropic up to $42 billion to help pay for the computing power Anthropic needs, and much of that computing power runs on technology Broadcom helps build. The arrangement, disclosed in Anthropic's IPO prospectus, is one of the clearest examples yet of the circular financing propping up the AI buildout.

The money comes as convertible notes. They are sized to cover roughly one-third of Anthropic's $125.2 billion in five-year TPU lease obligations, the bill for the custom chips Anthropic rents to train and run its models.

Supplier, lender, maybe owner

Broadcom works with Google on those custom TPUs, and it is expected to sit at the center of Anthropic's infrastructure. Anthropic is projected to become Broadcom's top chip-design and compute customer by 2027.

So the loop looks like this. Broadcom lends Anthropic money, Anthropic leases capacity built around Broadcom-supplied technology, and that spending flows back into Broadcom's revenue. Because the notes are convertible, the debt can also turn into an ownership stake in Anthropic, which would make Broadcom a supplier, a creditor and a shareholder at once.

Anthropic itself flagged the tension. The prospectus warns of potential conflicts of interest arising from Broadcom's combined role as supplier and lender.

Why it matters

Vendor financing is not new, but the scale is. A single chip partner underwriting tens of billions of a customer's compute concentrates a lot of risk in a small circle of companies whose revenue increasingly depends on each other. If AI demand stalls, the same dollars that inflated both sides of the ledger unwind together.

Regulators have been busy elsewhere in finance, from Washington's slow-moving crypto custody rewrite at OIRA to Europe's fight over who gets a license, as when Lagarde blocked Binance's MiCA bid. Deals like this one show where the bigger concentration of power is forming: inside the AI supply chain, financed by the companies selling the shovels.