Bank of America, Citi, Morgan Stanley and Blackstone have agreed to finance a $63bn deal to buy AI computing equipment from Broadcom and lease it to Anthropic, Broadcom announced on 26 October. A newly formed special purpose vehicle will buy Broadcom’s XPU AI accelerators and networking hardware with committed financing, and Anthropic will lease the equipment from it. Deliveries are expected to begin in 2027.
The three banks are arranging the first-lien portion of the debt, and Blackstone is the sole provider of the second-lien portion. Broadcom will give the vehicle residual value support equal to the first-lien amount, so the chip maker shares the risk if the hardware is worth less than expected later on. The deal sits under a compute capacity agreement Broadcom and Anthropic announced earlier.
Why it matters: frontier AI now needs more hardware than even well-funded labs want to pay for upfront. Structures like this let a lab use the chips without buying them outright, and spread the cost across banks, a private equity firm and the chip maker. It came the same day Anthropic made its filing for a Nasdaq listing public, and shows how heavily Anthropic is betting on custom chips from Broadcom alongside other suppliers.