Wall Street starts selling record $60bn Anthropic chip debt

Summary

• Banks began syndicating a $60bn package funding Anthropic's lease of Google-designed chips, the largest chip financing yet.
• Broadcom guarantees $42bn of senior secured loans; an $18bn junior tranche carries no such guarantee.
• The deal is a market test of investor appetite for debt backing unproven AI business models.

The latest

Bank of America, Citigroup and Morgan Stanley began offloading parts of a new $60bn debt package on Monday to finance Anthropic's lease of Google-designed semiconductors, the largest chip-financing deal on record, the Financial Times reported. The banks, which committed to fund the deal, have approached other lenders to buy portions. Broadcom is guaranteeing the senior piece.

Details

• The structure: About $42bn of senior secured loans supported by Broadcom entered bank syndication on Monday, according to the Financial Times. A further $18bn of junior debt, carrying no Broadcom guarantee, is expected to launch later. Blackstone has already committed roughly $9bn to that junior tranche.
• The credit anchor: Broadcom will partially backstop the new debt to lower Anthropic's borrowing costs. Because Broadcom holds an A-minus credit rating, the senior loans could later be sold to a wider investor base through private placement or investment-grade bonds, the Financial Times reported.
• Where the money goes: Proceeds are earmarked for Anthropic's chip orders in 2027, with lease payments starting only after the semiconductors are delivered. The arrangement defers Anthropic's cash obligations until hardware is in hand, pushing repayment risk years forward.
• The junior risk: Lenders to the unguaranteed tranche are exposed directly to Anthropic's credit. Banks may therefore prefer to tap the market after Anthropic's planned initial public offering later this year, so investors can review the company's financial disclosures before buying.
• The convertible option: Anthropic could also issue up to $42bn of convertible notes to Broadcom to cover the lease payments, according to Broadcom's latest quarterly report. The report did not set out the terms or timing of any such issuance.
• The precedent: The package follows Broadcom's $35bn deal with Apollo and Blackstone months ago, tied to a 20-gigawatt platform described as AI XPV, intended to help Anthropic and OpenAI secure computing capacity. Combined, the two financings exceed $95bn.
• The chip rivalry: Broadcom is developing tensor processing units with Google, the chips Anthropic is leasing, as a challenge to Nvidia's dominance in AI accelerators. The scale of the lease ties Anthropic's compute roadmap to that alternative supply chain rather than Nvidia's.
• The market read: The Financial Times described the financing as a bellwether for appetite in AI debt, with concerns that heavy capital spending on artificial intelligence may not translate into profitable businesses over the long term.

Background

Ontime+ previously reported a smaller version of this financing, structured as roughly $42bn from Broadcom to Anthropic and disclosed through company filings. The package has since grown to $60bn and moved from a bilateral arrangement into formal syndication across Wall Street banks.

Between the lines

The split between the guaranteed and unguaranteed tranches shows where the market draws its line: investors will lend against Broadcom's A-minus rating, but pricing Anthropic's own credit appears to require the disclosures an IPO would force. Blackstone's $9bn commitment to the junior piece is the clearest signal so far that some institutions will take that exposure early.

What's next

Watch the take-up among banks approached for the senior loans, the launch terms of the $18bn junior tranche, and Anthropic's planned IPO later this year, which would open its financials to debt investors.

Source: Financial Times