Bank of America, Blackstone, Citi and Morgan Stanley are lining up $63 billion to buy AI computing infrastructure from Broadcom and lease it to Anthropic. The Wall Street Journal laid out the structure on Monday evening: the four will form a special purpose vehicle that buys Broadcom’s XPU accelerators and the matching networking gear. Anthropic rents.
It started at 40 billion
According to a second Journal report, Broadcom’s chief executive spent nearly two months getting banks to commit more than $40 billion — by the paper’s account the largest AI debt deal on record. The point was to let Anthropic lease specialized chips that Broadcom is developing together with Google. The number that ended up on paper is bigger than the one the talks started with.
That fits a pattern that keeps repeating this year. In early October the IPO prospectus revealed a convertible note under which Broadcom lends Anthropic up to $42 billion so Anthropic can lease Broadcom hardware. Two weeks later Anthropic offered Blackstone more than ten percent interest on $9 billion of subordinated debt through Project North Star. Now the same money shows up again, larger and routed through a company of its own.
Why the leasing matters more than the number
A special purpose vehicle buys the chips, not Anthropic. The purchase price stays off Anthropic’s balance sheet; the lease payments do not. And those lease payments are exactly the non-cancelable obligations that now appear in the S-1 in the hundreds of billions. For Anthropic this is the only shape in which compute at that scale can be acquired at all without raising that much equity first. For the banks it is a loan secured by hardware whose resale value nobody can name. Both sides know this. They signed anyway.