The Zhitong Finance App learned that Broadcom (AVGO.US), a leader in AI ASICs, Ethernet switch core chips, and data center optical interconnect chips, and the four major Wall Street financial giants, Bank of America, Blackstone Group, Citigroup, and Morgan Stanley, have jointly arranged a financing transaction of about 63 billion US dollars to provide significant financing support for Anthropic, the world's top AI model developer/AI application leader, to purchase AI chips.
Participating agencies said in a joint statement on Monday that the deal will be carried out through a new special purpose carrier, where the financial institutions mentioned above will provide promised financing to buy Broadcom chips and rent them to Anthropic. Broadcom guarantees part of the financing through an arrangement known as “residual value support”.
Some media previously reported earlier this month that the Wall Street Finance Alliance led by Broadcom has begun raising about 60 billion US dollars in new AI chip financing to support Anthropic and other leading AI application companies, banks such as Bank of America, Citibank, and Morgan Stanley.
The financing took shape over a few weeks and has been closely watched by Wall Street and Silicon Valley professionals. At a time when opposition to the expansion of data centers and market concerns about future demand, they hope to confirm that investors are still willing to support the construction of AI infrastructure. Broadcom wants to sell more chips and other data center equipment to challenge Nvidia; at the same time, AI companies such as Anthropic require more and more computing power.
The deal further expanded the scale of debt financing for the construction of AI infrastructure. Previously, related financing had reached the supermark of hundreds of billions of dollars or even close to trillions of dollars. Although a large portion of this capital goes to data centers, financing transactions for chip and server purchases are also actively increasing.
In August of this year, Nvidia also announced the establishment of partnerships with six financial giants, including Blackstone, and plans to raise more than 500 billion US dollars for the AI field, including helping customers raise funds to purchase Nvidia chips.
US$63 billion chip financing landed, AI “financial relay” added key support
The core significance of Broadcom's $63 billion deal is to allow Anthropic's computing power procurement to obtain a more specific financing acceptance mechanism. Bank of America, Blackstone, Citibank, and Morgan Stanley provided financing commitments to purchase core equipment related to AI infrastructure such as Broadcom's AI accelerators and network infrastructure from a newly established special purpose vehicle (SPV) and then leased to Anthropic; Broadcom provided partial residual value support. The joint announcement made it clear that this is a previously announced strategic computing power agreement, and delivery is expected to begin in 2027. Therefore, its direct benefit is to enhance the enforceability of existing procurement plans and provide an important financial basis for converting chip orders into delivery and revenue.
The deal comes against a backdrop where credit markets are still tight. The October 22 report showed that CoreWeave's secondary market yield of a bond due in 2031 reached about 15.76%; on October 26, its five-year credit default swap (CDS) spread was about 1,148 basis points, corresponding to a 5-year cumulative implied default probability of about 62% under the assumption of a 40% recovery rate, which included a risk premium and was not an actual default prediction. In the same period, Meta, Alphabet, and Microsoft's five-year CDS were about 121, 83, and 55 basis points, respectively, up from 98, 73, and 52 basis points on September 25. The amount of risk compensation for corporate credit bonds required by the market has generally risen, but there is a significant gap in the pressure experienced by different companies.
Looking at at least $210 billion in financing transactions involving Goldman Sachs, the expansion of funding sources is more clear: Meta promotes equity financing, SpaceX uses equipment finance leasing, Anthropic promotes initial public offerings (IPOs), and Broadcom introduces bank financing and private equity to support equipment procurement. Together, these arrangements respond to the market question of “how can AI construction capital continue”: capital is still willing to support part of the expansion of computing power, but is paying more and more attention to identifiable equipment assets, contract cash flow, and credit support.
The latest AI computing power industry chain dynamics described above can be described as providing an important positive signal for the semiconductor sector, which has recently experienced a major sell-off, to continue to upgrade procurement capital, but this does not mean that the pressure on financing costs in the AI field has declined across the board.
From selling chips to supporting financing: How Broadcom turned computing power requirements into complete deliverable orders
The underlying mechanism of Broadcom's latest arrangement is to organize equipment procurement, use, and financing separately. SPV funds the purchase of equipment, Anthropic obtains the right to use it through leases, and lease payments provide cash flow for debt repayment. Bank of America, Citibank, and Morgan Stanley have arranged First-Lien Financing (First-Lien Financing), while Blackstone is the only provider that has promised Second-Lien Financing (Second-Lien Financing). Different payment orders enable funds with different risk tolerance to participate in the same transaction.
Residual Value Support (Residual Value Support) provided by Broadcom is a key credit enhancement arrangement. The announcement revealed that the amount of support is comparable to the scale of first-line financing; its economic effect is that the supplier bears the risk of insufficient equipment value within the agreed scope and increases the recovery guarantee for part of the financing. This does not mean that Broadcom is unconditionally underwriting all of Anthropic's debts, but it does mean that while seeking chip sales, Broadcom is also taking part of the asset value risk. Supplier competitiveness is thus further extended to product, delivery and financing organization capabilities.
Derived from the AI computing power industry chain, this deal first supports sales and fulfillment of Broadcom's AI accelerators and network devices, and may drive demand for supporting memory, advanced packaging, and interconnection with actual delivery. For global semiconductors, it strengthens the transmission path of “financing supports procurement, procurement drives delivery, and delivery generates revenue”; for Broadcom's fundamentals and AI ASIC growth prospects, it helps expand the business growth base where its customized accelerated computing system competes fiercely with Nvidia's AI GPU computing power cluster.
With the increasing expansion of task complexity driven by the global AI intelligence frenzy set off by Muse, the specialization of systems such as TPU/AI ASIC is expected to drastically reduce the cost of inference per unit. According to institutions such as Morgan Stanley and Wedbush Securities that continue to be optimistic about the investment prospects of the AI computing power industry chain, the almost endless cutting-edge computing power in the AI reasoning era and the computing power demand surrounding AI agents enabled AI ASIC to grow into an important component of the second trillion-dollar computing power ecosystem without destroying GPU demand — instead further strengthening the AI computing power industry chain investment logic that “the AI semiconductor supercycle is not a single GPU cycle, but an exponential increase in the silicon content of the entire data center.”