Broadcom emerges as Anthropic’s pivotal backer, offering up to $42 billion in financing

The chipmaker is simultaneously supplier, lender and equipment lessor to the AI lab ahead of its IPO, a tangle of mutual dependence that highlights both the scale of the AI buildout and the risks Wall Street is watching.

Among the many partnerships laid out in Anthropic’s IPO prospectus, one stands apart: its relationship with chipmaker Broadcom. The tie-up reaches across computing supply, equipment leasing and financing, giving Broadcom a central role in building the AI lab’s infrastructure. That sets it apart from partners such as Amazon, which mainly supply cloud capacity and distribution for Anthropic’s Claude model.

The filing reveals that Broadcom has agreed to lend Anthropic up to $42 billion to fund infrastructure spending. In return, Anthropic is set to become the biggest customer of Broadcom’s core chip design business next year. The arrangement is a textbook case of the circular spending that has fed scepticism among investors, even as Anthropic prepares a listing…