Broadcom’s $42 billion deal with Anthropic: Key details to know

Broadcom is set to lend Anthropic up to $42 billion to help the AI company sustain chips for its growing computing needs. The company’s relationship with Anthropic spans compute supply and captive financing giving the semiconductor company a prime role in Anthropic’s deployment of large-scale systems. This differentiates it from other major partners and investors such as Amazon which primarily provides cloud infrastructure and distribution for Anthropic’s model Claude.

As part of the intricate relationship revealed in the IPO filing, Broadcom has agreed to lend Anthropic up to $42 billion for capital spending.

That Anthropic is poised to become the primary client in Broadcom’s bread-and-butter chip design business next year highlights how the revenue of one company relies directly on the capital expenditure of the other, a dynamic that has animated AI skeptics on Wall Street.

Managing partner of Rothschild&Co. Robert Leitao said: “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.”

Google and Broadcom have collaborated across several design cycles of Google's TPUs. In April, Anthropic announced its expanded partnership with Broadcom and Google that will give it access to multiple gigawatts of next-generation TPU compute capacity beginning in 2027.

According to Anthropic, Broadcom’s role in supplying captive financing partners creates potential conflicts of interest that might affect Anthropic's computer availability. The AI company also cautioned that Broadcom’s decisions could affect its ability to secure enough computing infrastructure. 

The company warned that certain performance defaults would accelerate a substantial portion of its lease obligations due while restricting its ability to use the $42 billion financing facility to cover those payments.

Furthermore, Anthropic is expected to become Broadcom’s biggest compute customer in 2027; as Broadcom projects AI semiconductor revenue of about $115 billion in fiscal year 2027