Anthropic’s IPO paperwork has a financing twist nobody has tried at this scale. The chipmaker Broadcom has agreed to lend the AI lab up to $42 billion so it can keep spending on AI infrastructure — infrastructure that largely means renting Broadcom’s own chips. The arrangement was disclosed in Anthropic’s IPO prospectus and first reported by Reuters on October 1.
The facility comes in the form of convertible notes that Anthropic could draw to fund its compute buildout. It would cover roughly one-third of the $125.2 billion, five-year compute-lease commitment Anthropic has already signed for — and Anthropic expects no notes to be sold before the IPO closes.
Supplier, lessor, and lender — all at once
This is what makes the deal genuinely unusual. Broadcom is not just Anthropic’s chip supplier. It is already the lessor on a large slice of Anthropic’s TPU compute leases. With this facility, it becomes the lender financing those leases too. Broadcom can even designate a financing partner for the arrangement, and the notes are convertible into Anthropic shares.
The filing papers the relationship with a restricted cash account for Broadcom’s benefit, into which Anthropic deposited cash back in April 2026. And the direction of travel is one-way: Anthropic is set to become Broadcom’s largest compute customer in 2027, while Broadcom projects AI semiconductor revenue of roughly $115 billion in fiscal 2027 and about $230 billion in fiscal 2028.
The prospectus warns about itself
Here is the part no competitor rewrite is covering: the prospectus explicitly flags the circular structure as a risk. It discloses “potential conflicts of interest” — Broadcom’s decisions on hardware pricing and availability could affect Anthropic’s ability to access the compute it needs. And if Anthropic ever defaults on payments or performance terms, a “substantial portion” of its lease obligations could become immediately due.
Anthropic declined to comment on the arrangement. Broadcom did not comment.
The Nvidia playbook, copied
The structure has an obvious precedent. Nvidia has been using its own balance sheet to fuel chip sales across the industry, and Broadcom is now doing the same. “Nvidia is putting in place a massive amount of its balance sheet, and Broadcom is having to follow suit,” Seaport Research analyst Jay Goldberg told Reuters.
That has some financiers uneasy. “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,” Robert Leitao, managing partner at Rothschild & Co, told Reuters.
The math behind a $2 trillion valuation
The deal lands inside prospectus numbers that are staggering even by AI-boom standards. As TechCrunch reported from the filing, Anthropic pulled in roughly $4.6 billion in 2025 revenue — up about twelvefold year over year — but posted an operating loss exceeding $8 billion and a $42 billion net loss, including roughly $34 billion in non-cash financing charges. Its cloud, compute, and infrastructure commitments now top $518 billion, about 80% of it non-cancelable.
The growth case is real: revenue alone hit $11.5 billion in the second quarter of 2026, per the FT. But the concentration risk is equally real — two customers account for roughly a quarter of revenue. Anthropic is targeting a valuation above $2 trillion in its listing, up from $965 billion in its May raise. The prospectus even carries an existential-risk disclosure warning that its AI could, in theory, contribute to the end of humanity.
Why this matters
The AI boom is increasingly financed by the companies selling the shovels. Vendor-financed demand is not new — the telecom boom ran on it, and it ended badly — but this is the most extreme version the AI cycle has produced: a chipmaker lending its biggest customer the money to keep renting its chips, and taking the other side of the trade in shares. It works as long as Anthropic’s revenue keeps compounding. If growth stalls, the conflicts the prospectus flags in its own pages become very real, very fast.
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