By Hamza Faisal
Anthropic's IPO prospectus has revealed that chipmaker Broadcom has agreed to lend the AI lab up to $42 billion to help finance its sprawling infrastructure buildout, Reuters reported on Thursday, in one of the clearest examples yet of the circular financing spreading across the artificial intelligence industry.
The arrangement was disclosed in the company's IPO filing, which also laid out total cloud, compute and infrastructure obligations running to $518 billion over the coming years.
Broadcom, which helps design Google's tensor processing units, occupies a unique three-way position in Anthropic's ecosystem: chip supplier, equipment lessor, and now lender.

A chip supplier that is also a lender

The financing would take the form of convertible notes that could ultimately give Broadcom an equity stake in Anthropic, Reuters reported.
The debt would cover roughly one-third of a $125.2 billion five-year commitment Anthropic has made to lease tensor processing unit, or TPU, computing capacity — the specialized AI chips that Google designs together with Broadcom.
Under the arrangement, Broadcom retains the option to designate a financing partner to take part in the facility, and Anthropic said in its filing that it does not expect any notes to be sold before it completes its initial public offering.
As part of the deal, Anthropic deposited cash into a restricted account for Broadcom's benefit in April 2026 and may have to contribute additional amounts in certain circumstances, the filing says.

Anthropic flags the conflict itself

Anthropic's own prospectus warns that Broadcom's combined role as hardware supplier and financing partner creates "potential conflicts of interest" that might affect the lab's ability to access the computing power it needs.
Broadcom's decisions around pricing and hardware could affect Anthropic's ability to procure enough computing infrastructure, the filing says.
The company also warned that certain payment or performance defaults could make a substantial portion of its lease obligations immediately due while limiting its ability to use the $42 billion financing facility to cover those payments. Broadcom declined to comment, and Anthropic declined to comment, Reuters reported.
"It feels that there's quite a concentrated bet right now on two companies being able to generate enough revenues to support all the financing that's happened," Robert Leitao, managing partner of Rothschild & Co., told Reuters.
Anthropic is said to be targeting a valuation of more than $2 trillion as it prepares its public debut, with nearly $4.6 billion in 2025 revenue against an operating loss exceeding $8 billion.

The industry's circular financing habit

The Broadcom deal is part of a much larger shift. Microsoft invested billions in OpenAI, which became a major buyer of Microsoft Azure computing capacity;
Amazon invested billions in Anthropic, which committed heavily to AWS infrastructure; and Nvidia has proposed huge financing structures intended to support AI infrastructure built around its chips.
"Nvidia is putting in place a massive amount of its balance sheet, and Broadcom is having to follow suit," Seaport Research analyst Jay Goldberg told Reuters.
Broadcom had already started moving down a similar path. In June, the chipmaker joined Apollo and Blackstone in launching an AI infrastructure financing platform, starting with a $35 billion transaction supporting more than one gigawatt of Anthropic compute capacity.
The Bank for International Settlements reported Thursday that 46.4% of AI-to-AI investment deal value between 2021 and 2025 involved companies with commercial supply-chain relationships with each other.