Broadcom has agreed to lend Anthropic up to $42 billion to help finance the AI lab's infrastructure buildout, according to Anthropic's draft initial public offering prospectus as reported by Reuters on 1 October 2026. The financing would take the form of convertible notes that Anthropic could turn into equity, and the company said it does not expect to sell any of the notes before completing the planned listing. In the same document Anthropic is targeting a valuation of roughly $2 trillion.
What is in the facility
The loan could cover approximately one-third of the $125.2 billion five-year commitment Anthropic has made to lease tensor processing unit, or TPU, computing capacity, per the prospectus. Broadcom can designate a financing partner under the agreement. Anthropic also disclosed that in April 2026 it deposited cash into a restricted account for Broadcom's benefit under the convertible debt arrangement, and that it could be required to contribute additional amounts to that account in certain circumstances.
The facility sits on top of an expanded partnership with Broadcom and Google announced in April 2026, which is expected to give Anthropic access to multiple gigawatts of next-generation TPU computing capacity beginning in 2027. Broadcom works with Google on custom TPUs and is expected to become Anthropic's largest compute customer in 2027. Broadcom projects roughly $115 billion of AI semiconductor revenue in fiscal 2027 and $230 billion in fiscal 2028, which means one of the industry's fastest-growing customers would sit near the centre of those forecasts.
Why it matters: circular financing in plain sight
The structure is one of the clearest examples yet of circular financing in the AI industry: a chip supplier lends its customer the money to lease infrastructure built around that supplier's technology, so capital that leaves the supplier as credit comes back as orders. Nvidia has increasingly used its balance sheet and investments to help customers finance AI infrastructure containing its own chips, and the Broadcom-Anthropic arrangement extends the same playbook to lending.
Robert Leitao, managing partner of Rothschild & Co, described the concentration of risk in a comment to Reuters: "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." The Bank for International Settlements put numbers on the pattern in Bulletin 137, published on 1 October 2026: between 2021 and 2025, 28.7% of AI firms' investment deals by deal value involved a target that was itself an AI firm, 55.2% of incoming investment in AI firms came from other AI firms, and 46.4% of AI-to-AI deal value involved companies that already had commercial supplier-customer relationships. The BIS labels these webs "circular financing" and warns that they can amplify financial-market volatility, because the same balance sheets appear on several sides of the chain at once.
What the filing does not show
The prospectus has not been publicly filed: every figure above comes from documents reviewed by news organisations rather than an official registration statement, so the terms could still change before the listing. Anthropic itself flags the tension. The prospectus states that Broadcom's dual role as hardware supplier and financing partner creates "potential conflicts of interest" that could affect Anthropic's access to computing capacity, since Broadcom's decisions on pricing and hardware availability could influence whether Anthropic secures the infrastructure it needs. The $42 billion is a financing facility, not immediate spending, and the convertible notes are not expected to be sold before the IPO. Broadcom and Anthropic both declined to comment to Reuters. Whether the facility, the offering and the revenue projections all hold together remains an open question rather than a settled fact.
Sources
- [CNBC (Reuters wire) - Broadcom to lend Anthropic up to $42 billion to lease its chips, filing says](cnbc.com)
- [Reuters - Broadcom to lend Anthropic up to $42 billion to lease its chips, filing says](reuters.com)
- [TechStartups - Broadcom to lend Anthropic up to $42 billion to lease its own chips as AI circular financing hits a new level](techstartups.com)
- [Pulse 2.0 - Broadcom To Lend Anthropic Up To $42 Billion To Finance AI Infrastructure](pulse2.com)
- [BIS Bulletin 137 - Circular relationships among AI firms](bis.org)
