Blackstone and three banks line up $63 billion to finance Broadcom chips for Anthropic

Bank of America, Blackstone, Citi and Morgan Stanley announced on Oct 26 a $63 billion financing to buy Broadcom AI chips and networking gear that will be leased to Anthropic [1]. Reuters called it one of the largest debt deals tied to the AI buildout [2].

• A newly formed special purpose vehicle will buy Broadcom's custom AI accelerators, which it calls XPUs, and networking equipment, then lease them to Anthropic [1].
• Bank of America, Citi and Morgan Stanley are arranging the first-lien financing; Blackstone is the sole provider of the committed second-lien portion [1].
• Broadcom is giving the vehicle residual value support equal to the first-lien portion, backstopping part of the debt [1][3].
• Deliveries are due from calendar 2027 under Broadcom's earlier deal for Anthropic to access about 3.5 gigawatts of tensor processing unit (TPU) compute [1][4].

The announcement came hours after Anthropic publicly filed for an IPO on Oct 26; The Wall Street Journal reported the listing could value the company at $1.5 trillion to $2 trillion [5][6]. The filing says Anthropic began signing purchase commitments and lease agreements around Sept 30 under a program called Anthropic Direct, in which partners run the data centers and Anthropic leases the compute [7]. Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs are lead book-runners on the IPO [6]. IPO Scoop, citing Bloomberg, reported that Anthropic could start marketing the offering as soon as the week of Nov 9 [6].