❯ Anthropic’s prospectus shows Broadcom will lend it up to $42 billion to back a TPU lease worth over $100 billion

The chip supplier becomes a lenderAccording to Reuters, citing Anthropic’s IPO prospectus, Broadcom has agreed to lend Anthropic up to $42 billion through convertible notes. The money can help pay for Anthropic’s five-year TPU lease commitment worth $125.2 billion. A convertible note is debt that can be turned into shares under agreed conditions.

A three-way relationship behind the TPUTPUs are Google’s in-house AI chips for training and running large models, and Broadcom helps design and build them. In April, Anthropic said it would get about 3.5 gigawatts of TPU-based compute through Broadcom starting in 2027. Earlier reports also said Apollo and Blackstone were raising about $36 billion in chip debt for Anthropic, guaranteed by Broadcom. The prospectus is the first time the scale of these arrangements has been laid out publicly.

Bigger leases, tighter tiesA five-year lease worth over $100 billion means Anthropic’s revenue has to keep growing fast enough to cover a fixed compute bill. By lending money to a customer that buys chips it helps build, Broadcom locks in orders but also ties its own balance sheet to Anthropic’s growth. Once Anthropic is public, long-term commitments like this will be central to how investors judge its risk.

▪ SIGNALWhen suppliers start lending customers the money to buy their chips, the AI compute race has moved beyond selling hardware to who is willing to carry the customer’s credit risk.