By Rohail Saleem
Publication Date: 2026-10-27 15:27:00
In the supply-constrained world of AI, cheaper is not always better, especially when financing is rapidly emerging as the biggest roadblock for ex-NVIDIA silicon, as evidenced by a recent dramatic intervention on the part of Broadcom’s CEO to secure a critical loan for Anthropic.
It is also because of this ASIC-centric risk that Anthropic appears to be laying its proverbial eggs in multiple silicon baskets, including Google’s TPUs, Amazon’s Trainium, and GPUs from NVIDIA and AMD.
The Wall Street Journal reported recently that Broadcom’s mammoth ‘North Star’ circular financing deal in favor of Anthropic had hit a roadblock amid a macro environment characterized by rising interest rates and market convulsions around neoclouds – cloud computing providers that deliver GPU-as-a-Service and AI inference capacity.
Under the framework of the deal that did eventually manage to go through this Monday, Broadcom would set up a Special Purpose Vehicle (SPV) that would secure $40 billion in loans from a syndicate of banks, with a separate loan from Blackstone bringing the total to $63 billion. The SPV would then buy the TPUs designed by Broadcom and Google and lease them to Anthropic, using the ensuing lease payments to repay the loan.
However, as negotiations remained mired in the nitty-gritty over the weekend, Broadcom’s CEO personally intervened, offering banks a higher interest rate on the proposed loan as well as guarantees to make up for…
