Broadcom is arranging more than $50 billion in financing for the custom artificial intelligence chip it is developing with OpenAI, the Wall Street Journal reported this week, in what would rank among the largest private technology financings ever attempted.
Apollo Global Management and Blackstone are among the lenders in talks to participate in the deal. The discussions are still at an early stage and the final size could change, but sources say a deal is targeted before the end of the year and could cover several gigawatts of computing capacity.
Nexus, Jalapeño and Serrano
Internally, OpenAI refers to the chip program as “Nexus,” with the first two generations carrying codenames drawn from peppers — Jalapeño, then Serrano. The two companies announced the collaboration in October 2025: 10 gigawatts of custom AI accelerators, with OpenAI designing the chips and systems while Broadcom develops and deploys them in racks built with its Ethernet and other networking gear.
Deployments were targeted to start in the second half of 2026 and continue through the end of 2029. For OpenAI, the push to own more of its computing is about lowering costs and depending less on cloud providers — a theme running through nearly all of its infrastructure moves this year.
Private credit is bankrolling the buildout
The deal rides on a structure Broadcom unveiled in June: a financing platform, known as the AI XPV Platform, with Apollo and Blackstone as anchor investors, built to fund more than 20 gigawatts of computing capacity on Broadcom’s custom chips for frontier AI labs — including Anthropic and OpenAI — through 2028. The platform began with an initial $35 billion tranche led by Apollo.
The new $50 billion-plus facility looks like the first real test of whether that structure works at scale. Broadcom is simultaneously arranging debt to fund Anthropic’s AI chip purchases — Bloomberg previously reported talks of more than $60 billion there — and this week banks began syndicating a $42 billion senior-secured tranche of that package, led by Bank of America, Citigroup and Morgan Stanley.
Same week, same playbook
Broadcom is not the only one turning to bespoke debt. Oracle is negotiating with Apollo and Goldman Sachs on a framework in which private investors would fund an off-balance-sheet entity to buy chips and lease them back to Oracle — the explicit point being to secure the compute without putting the debt on its own balance sheet.
And SpaceX is pursuing a roughly $40 billion package, split between bank loans and investment-grade bonds, to buy Nvidia graphics processors outright. Nvidia, for its part, has partnered with six finance firms to build compute-financing platforms targeting more than $500 billion. The message from Wall Street is unmistakable: AI’s appetite for hardware has outgrown the corporate balance sheet, and the lenders are becoming as load-bearing as the chipmakers.
