Bank of America, Blackstone, Citigroup and Morgan Stanley agreed to provide $63 billion of financing to buy Broadcom Inc. artificial intelligence chips and networking equipment for Anthropic, one of the largest debt packages yet tied to the AI computing buildout, the parties said Monday.
The money will flow through a newly formed special purpose vehicle that will purchase Broadcom XPU accelerators and networking products and lease them to Anthropic. The transaction is part of a strategic compute capacity agreement Broadcom announced earlier, with deliveries expected to begin in calendar 2027.
Two layers of debt and a chipmaker backstop
Bank of America, Citi and Morgan Stanley are arranging the first-lien portion of the financing, the senior layer that is repaid first. Blackstone is the sole provider of the committed second-lien portion, which ranks below it. The parties did not disclose the split, though people familiar with the matter have put the first-lien piece at about $43.5 billion, or roughly 69% of the total.
The key credit feature is Broadcom’s involvement. The chipmaker is providing residual value support to the vehicle in an amount equal to the first-lien financing, which in effect protects senior lenders if the leased hardware loses value faster than expected. That matters because the collateral, advanced AI accelerators, can lose value quickly as newer chip generations ship.
Why it matters
The structure shows how lenders are adapting equipment-lease and project-finance tools to AI data centers, letting a model developer secure enormous amounts of hardware without putting the full cost on its own balance sheet. Apollo and Blackstone previously agreed to finance a $35 billion expansion of Anthropic’s computing capacity under an earlier Broadcom arrangement, in which Broadcom’s backstop reached up to $29 billion, according to a Broadcom filing.
Moody’s has described Broadcom as one of the strongest large technology companies but cautioned that its risk would rise if it took on multiple such commitments in a short period to meet the funding needs of frontier AI labs.
The financing was announced the same day Anthropic filed publicly for an initial public offering on Nasdaq.
Advisers
Kirkland & Ellis is legal counsel to Blackstone, and Latham & Watkins represents Bank of America, Citi and Morgan Stanley. Sullivan & Cromwell is counsel to Broadcom, with Evercore serving as Broadcom’s financial adviser.
Executives at the four lenders described the transaction as a milestone in financing AI compute at scale. Broadcom Chief Executive Hock Tan said the transaction showed that capital is available to fund continued growth in demand for AI computing. Bank of America is based in Charlotte, N.C., where the joint announcement was also datelined.
