Broadcom Will Lend Anthropic $42 Billion to Lease Its Own Chips

Here's a headline that reads like a riddle: Broadcom is lending Anthropic up to $42 billion — so Anthropic can buy chips from Broadcom. The arrangement, revealed in Anthropic's IPO prospectus and first reported by Reuters on October 1, might be the purest example yet of the circular financing quietly fueling the AI boom.

The deal

Broadcom has agreed to lend Anthropic up to $42 billion to finance its infrastructure buildout. The money comes as convertible notes: Broadcom can designate a financing partner, and the notes could convert into Anthropic shares. Anthropic says it doesn't expect any notes to be sold before its IPO is complete.

The loan would fund roughly a third of Anthropic's $125.2 billion commitment — a five-year lease of TPU computing capacity. That detail matters because Broadcom has co-developed Google's TPUs for several generations, and an expanded April partnership with Broadcom and Google gives Anthropic access to multiple gigawatts of next-generation TPU compute starting in 2027.

The money flows the other way, too: Anthropic is expected to become Broadcom's largest customer in its core chip-design business next year.

Why Wall Street is raising eyebrows

Broadcom finances Anthropic. Anthropic spends it on compute built around Broadcom-supplied chips. Anthropic becomes Broadcom's biggest customer. It's textbook reciprocal spending — every deal funds the next deal, and the growth shows up on both sides of the ledger.

"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.

The stakes are enormous. Anthropic is preparing an IPO that could value it at $2 trillion, and the prospectus reads like a map of who owes what to whom in the AI economy.

AiPost's take

To be clear: this isn't a trick or anything close to fraud. Infrastructure industries have done vendor financing forever. But it's worth knowing what the AI boom is actually built on — not just better models, but a small circle of companies bankrolling each other to buy the same chips. When everyone is lending everyone money to buy from the lender, the "demand" for AI chips is partly self-made. File that away the next time a record capex number does the rounds.