By Brian Buntz
Publication Date: 2026-10-02 23:48:00
[Adobe Stock]
Broadcom, which co-designs Google’s AI chips, tensor processing units (TPUs), has agreed to lend Anthropic up to $42 billion to help finance its infrastructure spending, Reuters reported, citing Anthropic’s IPO prospectus. Separately, Broadcom’s banking syndicate is assembling $60 billion in chip financing for Anthropic and other companies, Bloomberg reported, comprising $42 billion in senior secured debt and $18 billion in junior debt led by Blackstone.
The deal extends a pattern skeptics of the AI boom call circular financing. Hyperscalers such as Microsoft, Amazon and Google invest in frontier labs like OpenAI and Anthropic, sell them compute, and then book them as core customers. Chipmakers are following a similar playbook. Nvidia has taken stakes in startups that buy its GPUs, and in August it announced a partnership with Blackstone and other firms to mobilize more than $500 billion for AI, including financing for customers buying its chips.
“Nvidia is…