Broadcom to lend Anthropic up to $42 billion to lease its own chips as AI circular financing hits a new level

Broadcom has agreed to lend Anthropic up to $42 billion to help finance the AI startup’s enormous compute buildout, creating one of the clearest examples yet of the circular financing spreading across the artificial intelligence industry.

The arrangement, disclosed in Anthropic’s IPO prospectus and first reported by Reuters, could finance roughly one-third of Anthropic’s $125.2 billion five-year commitment to lease tensor processing unit, or TPU, computing capacity. Broadcom works with Google on custom TPUs and is expected to become a central supplier in Anthropic’s infrastructure buildout.

“Anthropic’s IPO ​prospectus documents extensive partnerships with a handful of big tech firms. One stands out: chip maker Broadcom.
The company’s relationship with ‌Anthropic spans compute supply, equipment leasing and financing — giving the semiconductor company a central role in Anthropic’s infrastructure buildout. That differentiates it from other major partners and investors such as Amazon, which primarily provide cloud infrastructure and distribution for Anthropic’s model Claude,” Reuters reported.

That creates an unusual loop. Broadcom helps finance Anthropic. Anthropic uses that financing to lease huge amounts of computing infrastructure built around technology Broadcom helps supply. Anthropic, in turn, is expected to become Broadcom’s largest compute customer in 2027.

Anthropic

“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 financing would take the form of convertible notes, potentially giving Broadcom an equity stake in Anthropic. Anthropic said in the filing that it does not expect to sell any notes before its IPO is completed.

The scale puts a new spotlight on a question hanging over the AI boom: How much of the industry’s explosive demand is being financed by the same companies that stand to benefit from that spending?

AI circular financing machine gets bigger

The Broadcom-Anthropic arrangement is part of a much larger shift across the AI industry.

Chipmakers, cloud providers and AI labs are increasingly tied together through investments, purchase commitments, loans, leases and financing guarantees. Capital can flow from an infrastructure supplier into an AI company, then flow back through chip or computing-capacity purchases.

The Bank for International Settlements (BIS) calls these relationships “circular financing.” In a report published Thursday, the BIS found that 46.4% of AI-to-AI investment deal value between 2021 and 2025 involved companies that had commercial supply-chain relationships with each other.

“Between 2021 and 2025, 28.7% of artificial intelligence (AI) firms’ investment deals (by deal value) involved a target company that was also an AI firm, while 55.2% of incoming investments in AI firms came from other AI firms,” BIS wrote.

The pattern has surfaced across some of AI’s biggest deals.

Microsoft invested billions in OpenAI, which became a major buyer of Microsoft Azure computing capacity. Amazon invested billions in Anthropic, which committed heavily to AWS infrastructure and Amazon’s Trainium chips. In January, Nvidia invested $2 billion in GPU cloud provider CoreWeave, which built its business around Nvidia hardware, then agreed to buy billions of dollars of CoreWeave capacity that went unsold to other customers.

Nvidia later took the model much further, proposing huge financing structures intended to support AI infrastructure built around its chips. Wall Street lenders have begun wrestling with whether GPUs themselves can serve as reliable collateral for long-term infrastructure financing.

Broadcom had already started moving down a similar path. In June, the chipmaker joined Apollo and Blackstone in launching an AI infrastructure financing platform, starting with a $35 billion transaction supporting more than one gigawatt of Anthropic compute capacity built around Broadcom XPUs and networking technology.

The new $42 billion facility deepens that relationship.

Anthropic itself acknowledges the potential tension. Its prospectus says Broadcom’s position as both hardware supplier and financing partner creates “potential conflicts of interest” that could affect Anthropic’s access to computing capacity. Decisions involving Broadcom’s pricing and hardware could affect Anthropic’s ability to secure the infrastructure it needs.

Broadcom declined to comment to Reuters. Anthropic declined to comment.

AI compute is starting to look like industrial finance

The bigger story is what has happened to the economics of building frontier AI.

Training and running advanced models increasingly requires infrastructure commitments measured in tens or hundreds of billions of dollars. Anthropic has disclosed at least $518 billion in infrastructure commitments over the coming decade, much of it through long-term agreements with companies including Google, Amazon, Microsoft and Broadcom.

That scale is pushing AI beyond the traditional model of technology companies buying servers from suppliers. The industry is starting to resemble capital-intensive infrastructure markets where vendors, customers, lenders and investors can occupy several roles at once.

Broadcom projects roughly $115 billion in AI semiconductor revenue in fiscal 2027 and $230 billion in fiscal 2028. Anthropic becoming its largest compute customer would put one of the biggest AI labs directly at the center of that growth.

These structures make sense. AI labs need extraordinary amounts of capital and guaranteed access to scarce compute. Chipmakers want predictable demand for enormous manufacturing and infrastructure commitments. Investors want exposure to an industry attracting historic levels of spending.

The risk is that each part of the system increasingly depends on the others.

The BIS warned earlier this year that AI capital spending is beginning to outpace internal cash generation, pushing companies toward debt and private credit. Its research has raised another concern: financial stress at one heavily connected AI company could spread through a network of suppliers, investors and customers.

That does not mean circular financing proves AI demand is artificial. It does mean headline revenue, infrastructure commitments and investment flows increasingly need to be viewed together.

Broadcom lending Anthropic as much as $42 billion captures that shift in one deal. The company supplying a key piece of the AI infrastructure stack may soon be helping finance one of its biggest customers to consume it.

The AI arms race is no longer being financed from the sidelines. Companies selling compute are increasingly helping finance buyers.