Banks, Blackstone Back $63B Broadcom Chip Lease for Anthropic

On Monday 26 October 2026, Bank of America, Blackstone, Citi and Morgan Stanley announced a $63 billion transaction to fund AI computing capacity for Anthropic using Broadcom technology. Reuters described it as one of the largest debt deals tied to the AI buildout. It matters because the chip supplier is guaranteeing part of the lenders' exposure, which makes this a vendor-backed credit structure and not an ordinary equipment loan.

How is the $63 billion deal structured?

A newly formed special purpose vehicle will use the committed capital to buy Broadcom's XPU AI accelerators and networking products, then lease them to Anthropic. Pulse 2 reported that Bank of America, Citi and Morgan Stanley are arranging the first-lien portion. Blackstone is the sole provider of the committed second-lien financing.

The deal is part of a strategic compute capacity agreement that Broadcom announced earlier, and Quartz reported that deliveries are expected to start in calendar 2027. None of the coverage I reviewed gave the size of the first-lien tranche, the interest rates, or the lease term.

What does "residual value support" mean for Broadcom?

Reuters reported that Broadcom's support effectively works as a guarantee for senior lenders. Broadcom agrees to absorb potential declines in the assets' value up to an amount equal to the first-lien debt. The same report notes that the release did not disclose how large that debt is.

The reason for the guarantee is straightforward. A lender to a chip lease has two sources of repayment: the lessee's payments and the resale value of the hardware if the lessee fails. Accelerators age quickly, so lenders are unwilling to assume a fixed resale value for years. By taking that risk on itself, Broadcom turns an uncertain asset into something senior lenders can underwrite. Reuters noted that chipmakers have offered such guarantees before.

The result is that part of Anthropic's credit risk, and the risk on the hardware, now sits with Broadcom. Moody's, as cited by Reuters, described Broadcom as one of the strongest large technology companies. It warned that the risk would increase if multiple transactions were undertaken over a short period to meet the funding needs of frontier AI labs.

Why did Anthropic's IPO filing land the same day?

Anthropic publicly filed its S-1 on the same day, planning to trade under the ticker ANT. Yahoo Finance reported $16.3 billion in revenue for the six months to June, more than the $4.6 billion in all of 2025. It also reported an $80.7 billion net loss for the period, most of it accounting charges. Yahoo Finance's coverage said Anthropic recorded $974 million of operating income in the second quarter, after a $1.7 billion operating loss in the first.

The filing's size context is useful for judging the $63 billion. By my arithmetic, it is roughly four times Anthropic's first-half revenue. A newsletter summary of the S-1 by Trace Cohen's Value Add Daily says Note 13 puts expected fixed or minimum infrastructure commitments at about $265.6 billion as of 30 June, with terms of one to 20 years. The same newsletter's headline refers to a compute commitment of up to $567 billion, and I could not reconcile the two figures from the material I read. I have not opened the filing itself, so treat both as secondhand.

The timing suggests that a lease funded off the lab's own balance sheet lets it add compute without raising equity first. Financing of this kind also helps the public-offering story, because the largest compute costs are shared with lenders and the supplier. That reading is my analysis; the companies have not described it that way.

Were the lenders comfortable with the risk?

Not uniformly, according to one report. Benzinga, summarising The Wall Street Journal, said some banks grew anxious about the deal, known internally as "Project North Star," over recent weeks. With rates rising and AI ventures harder to finance, some felt they weren't being paid enough for the risk and considered pulling out. I could not verify the original Journal report, and the deal announced on Monday shows the group stayed together.

Broadcom CEO Hock Tan said in a statement, as Quartz reported, that the deal "validates that there is capital available" to finance AI compute growth. That is a sales message as much as a finance statement. Broadcom's residual value support is the feature that made the capital available.

How does this compare with other AI infrastructure financing?

The deal builds on an earlier arrangement. Reuters said Apollo and Blackstone had agreed to finance a $35 billion expansion of Anthropic's computing capacity under a prior agreement with Broadcom. That makes two large financings tied to the same supplier relationship.

Smaller players are raising money the same way. A separate Reuters report on 27 October said Argentum AI, a Super Micro-backed cloud firm, is in talks for a $5 billion chip financing with a private credit firm, according to two people familiar. It added that Nebius had secured a $3.5 billion facility from Citi the previous week. Argentum's talks are unconfirmed.

Blackstone's view of the market is on record too. According to Investing News Network's weekly roundup, Blackstone President Jon Gray said on the Q3 call that chips, power and large-scale fundraising are the limits on building more AI capacity. He said this makes its existing powered sites "more valuable today." Blackstone is a lender here and a data center investor elsewhere, so it profits if capacity stays scarce.

What should business readers take from this?

Four practical points follow, and they are my inferences from the reporting.

• Cloud and AI buyers: Capacity is increasingly financed through leases and special purpose vehicles. When you sign multi-year compute contracts with a lab or neocloud, ask who bears the hardware and counterparty risk, because it affects pricing and continuity.
• Chip and server vendors: Residual value support is becoming a sales tool. Suppliers that can back it will win large orders, and suppliers that can't will lose them. This puts a vendor's own balance sheet into the competitive equation.
• Finance teams and analysts: Contingent support does not show up as debt on the supplier's books in the same way, so read the footnotes. Moody's concern about repeated deals is the specific thing to monitor.
• Founders building on frontier models: The compute that serves your workloads is leased and levered. A financing that breaks down can slow capacity expansion, so keep a second model provider in your architecture.

What should you watch next?

Watch for the pricing and size of Anthropic's offering, since the S-1 left the price range, share count, raise size and valuation blank. Watch for any further Broadcom-backed vehicles for other customers, which would be the scenario Moody's flagged. And watch whether lenders ask for tighter terms as rates rise. The first deliveries in 2027 will show whether the hardware holds the value Broadcom has underwritten.