Broadcom is offering Anthropic up to $42 billion in convertible notes to help fund its AI infrastructure, tying a major source of financing to the company that supplies the chips. Anthropic’s IPO prospectus says the arrangement could help pay for a five-year TPU lease worth $125.2 billion, while warning that Broadcom’s dual role may create conflicts of interest.
Financing for a large TPU commitment
The notes would cover about a third of Anthropic’s lease commitment for Google’s Tensor Processing Units, or TPUs, which Google develops with Broadcom. The notes could be converted into Anthropic shares. The company does not expect them to be sold before it goes public.
Anthropic has already placed cash in a restricted account for Broadcom, and may have to add to it under certain conditions. In April, Anthropic announced an expanded agreement with Google and Broadcom for several gigawatts of next-generation TPU capacity starting in 2027.
Broadcom expects Anthropic to become its largest compute customer in 2027. The company has forecast about $115 billion in AI-chip revenue for fiscal 2027 and $230 billion for fiscal 2028.
The lender is also the supplier
Anthropic’s prospectus spells out the complication: Broadcom is both financing the infrastructure and supplying equipment for it. The filing says this relationship could affect Anthropic’s access to the computing capacity it needs. Broadcom’s pricing or hardware decisions could also limit how much infrastructure Anthropic can acquire.
The financing does not remove the risks attached to the lease. Certain payment or performance defaults could make a significant portion of the lease obligations immediately due. In that situation, Anthropic might be able to use only a limited part of the $42 billion credit to cover the bill.
That is the less tidy side of a financing package built around a critical supplier. The money may support access to capacity, but the terms also leave Anthropic exposed to decisions and obligations tied to the same commercial relationship.
A wider bet on financing chip demand
The arrangement echoes a broader effort to connect chip financing with chip sales. Nvidia has used its balance sheet to support sales of its accelerators, and has discussed loans backed by those chips. Seaport Research analyst Jay Goldberg described Broadcom as following that example.
Rothschild & Co managing partner Robert Leitao raised a related concern: the financing depends on two companies generating enough revenue to service a large volume of obligations. That is a concentration of confidence as much as a concentration of capital.
Anthropic’s prospectus also disclosed a $42 billion loss in 2025, even as revenue grew twelvefold. A potential IPO could value the company at $2 trillion. Those figures do not resolve the financing risks, but they help explain why access to computing capacity, and the cost of securing it, has become central to the company’s plans.