Analysis
The Deal Behind the Number
Broadcom is in talks with a group of lenders to raise more than $60 billion in debt -- and potentially as much as $100 billion across the full structure -- to finance a special-purpose vehicle (SPV) that will buy Broadcom's custom AI chips and lease them to Anthropic, [24/7 Wall St. reported](https://247wallst.com/investing/2026/08/24/broadcoms-60-billion-ai-debt-deal-hides-a-370-billion-question-nobody-on-wall-street-wants-to-answer/) on August 24, corroborated by Yahoo Finance. The structure pairs a roughly $30 billion junior tranche with a $60-70 billion senior-secured tranche, with Broadcom guaranteeing part of the senior piece -- meaning Anthropic never buys the chips outright. Investors finance the purchase through the SPV, then lease the hardware to Anthropic, which pays for compute capacity rather than owning the underlying silicon.
This isn't Broadcom's first vehicle of this kind. Pulse previously covered an earlier version of this financing push on August 20, when Broadcom was reportedly discussing up to $100 billion in debt to cover both Anthropic and OpenAI chip production, with Anthropic alone expected to account for more than 40% of the volume. This week's talks build specifically on the AI XPV partnership Broadcom struck with Apollo and Blackstone in June, whose opening deal raised $35 billion to expand Anthropic's compute using Broadcom's custom chips and networking gear. Bank of America estimates the total exposure across this financing structure could reach $370 billion by 2029 -- a figure that has grown, not shrunk, every time this deal gets reported on.
“Investors finance the purchase through the SPV, then lease the hardware to Anthropic, which pays for compute capacity rather than owning the underlying silicon.”
Debt Is Doing What Equity Used To Do
The mechanism matters more than the headline figure. A venture round dilutes a company's cap table and prices risk directly into a valuation everyone can see. An SPV lease structure does neither -- the debt sits on a separate legal entity's books, not Broadcom's and not Anthropic's, and the chips never appear as a capital expenditure on either company's balance sheet the way a direct purchase would. That's precisely the pattern regulators have started flagging: Pulse has tracked roughly $3 trillion in off-balance-sheet AI financing obligations at nine major tech giants as of late August, nearly double a July estimate, with Fed officials publicly split on how worried to be about it.
Anthropic's own numbers explain why lenders are willing to underwrite this much debt against one customer. The company's annualized revenue run rate hit $65 billion in July, up from roughly $9 billion a year earlier -- a growth curve that makes a multi-year chip lease look more like financing a proven revenue stream than a speculative infrastructure bet. Anthropic's last private round, a $65 billion Series H in August at a $965 billion post-money valuation, gives lenders a recent, well-documented equity mark to underwrite against too.
Debt Isn't the Only Structure Expanding
What makes this week worth writing about as a trend rather than a single deal is that debt-financed infrastructure is expanding alongside, not instead of, straight equity. XPeng's robotics unit raised more than $900 million at a $6.3 billion post-money valuation the same week -- the largest single-round private financing in China's embodied-AI industry, led by IDG Capital with Tencent and Alibaba as strategic backers. That's a conventional priced equity round, with dilution and a public valuation mark, running in parallel with Broadcom's off-balance-sheet chip financing. Nvidia, meanwhile, is separately assembling a $500 billion financing pool with BlackRock, Blackstone, KKR, Apollo, Brookfield and Goldman Sachs -- financing designed explicitly to help its own customers afford its chips, a hybrid between vendor financing and a capital-markets instrument.
The Counterweight
The bear case here isn't that AI infrastructure spending is fake -- Anthropic's revenue growth is real and independently reported, and XPeng's raise came from IDG Capital and two of China's largest strategic tech investors, not speculative retail money. The risk is structural: SPV debt shifts default risk onto lenders and bondholders rather than onto the sponsor's own balance sheet, and every dollar of that risk is priced on the assumption that Anthropic's revenue curve keeps compounding at something close to its current rate for years, not quarters. Bank of America's $370 billion exposure estimate by 2029 is itself an admission that nobody has fully modeled what happens to this structure if AI demand growth merely slows to a normal SaaS growth rate rather than continuing to double.
What It Means for Founders, GPs and LPs
For founders raising into this environment, the practical read is that the largest AI infrastructure buildouts are increasingly decoupled from traditional venture math -- Anthropic isn't buying chips with a Series H check, it's leasing them through a lender-financed vehicle, which means the compute capacity available to frontier labs is growing faster than their own equity raises would suggest. For LPs, the diligence question worth asking any fund with AI infrastructure exposure is which tranche of which SPV they're actually underwriting, and what covenant protects them if a single customer's revenue growth stalls -- the junior tranche and the senior tranche do not carry the same risk, no matter how the headline number gets reported.