Broadcom to lend Anthropic up to $42B, deepening AI's circular financing web

Broadcom has agreed to lend Anthropic up to $42 billion, a facility disclosed in the AI startup's IPO prospectus that could finance roughly one-third of Anthropic's $125.2 billion five-year commitment to lease tensor processing unit, or TPU, computing capacity. Reuters first reported the arrangement.

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. Broadcom declined to comment to Reuters, and Anthropic also declined to comment.

The structure makes explicit a loop that has become familiar across the AI industry. Broadcom works with Google on custom TPUs and is expected to become a central supplier in Anthropic's infrastructure buildout. Anthropic would use the financing to lease large amounts of computing infrastructure built around technology Broadcom helps supply — and is expected to become Broadcom's largest compute customer in 2027. Broadcom projects roughly $115 billion in AI semiconductor revenue in fiscal 2027 and $230 billion in fiscal 2028.

Anthropic acknowledges the tension in its own filing. The 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, with decisions involving Broadcom's pricing and hardware able to affect Anthropic's ability to secure the infrastructure it needs.

The facility is part of a much larger shift. The Bank for International Settlements (BIS) calls these relationships "circular financing," and a report published Thursday 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. The BIS also found that 28.7% of 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.

Comparable patterns have surfaced elsewhere. Microsoft invested billions in OpenAI, which became a major buyer of Microsoft Azure 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.

Broadcom had already moved down this path. In June it 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.