Banks Prepare $60 Billion Broadcom Chip Financing for Anthropic as KBRA Reportedly Rates It BB+

Since Anthropic's IPO filing disclosed a Broadcom lending arrangement of up to $42 billion, and a day after some investors were reported discussing a $1.5 trillion valuation, the financing behind that arrangement has started to take shape.

Broadcom's banking syndicate is putting together a $60 billion package to fund AI chips and infrastructure for Anthropic and other AI companies, Bloomberg reported, citing people familiar with the matter. Neither Broadcom nor Anthropic has confirmed it. Both declined to comment, and the deal has not been formally announced.

How the $60 billion is structured

Per Bloomberg's account, banks are preparing to market a $42 billion Class A senior secured debt tranche. Blackstone is leading an $18 billion Class B junior tranche. Blackstone is also expected to commit $9 billion of its own money and syndicate the rest to investors.

It builds on a $35 billion partnership involving Broadcom, Blackstone and Apollo announced earlier this year to expand Anthropic's computing capacity. Broadcom's quarterly filing describes a first $35 billion tranche in June 2026 covering more than 1 gigawatt of compute. The same filing describes a platform meant to enable more than 20 gigawatts through 2028.

The filing also describes a backstop on a customer's five-year lease that could cost Broadcom up to about $29 billion if things went badly. It does not name the customer.

The credit rating

KBRA has assigned Anthropic a BB+ rating, according to Crypto Briefing. That is the top rung of speculative grade, one notch below investment grade.

A BB+ is not a distress signal. It does mean lenders are being paid for risk, and it puts Anthropic in the same credit bucket as plenty of leveraged borrowers rather than blue-chip issuers.

What Anthropic has committed to

Anthropic's IPO filing says Broadcom has agreed to lend the company up to $42 billion to finance infrastructure. The arrangement lets Anthropic lease tensor processing unit capacity. Anthropic has committed to spend $125.2 billion over five years on computing capacity.

Some of the debt instruments could be converted into Anthropic shares, and Broadcom could designate a financing partner. Anthropic's own prospectus says the setup creates potential conflicts of interest, since Broadcom would be supplier, lender and guarantor at once.

Devin Hornick, a partner at staffing firm KORE1, notes that lease payments begin only when hardware goes live in 2027. In his reading, the money is raised now and the bill comes due next year.

The concentration worry

Robert Leitao, managing partner at Rothschild & Co., put the risk this way: "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."

The financing has been in development for several weeks. It is being watched as a signal of whether investors will keep funding AI infrastructure amid public opposition to data center construction.

Elsewhere in the AI debt market, SpaceX is seeking about $40 billion to buy Nvidia chips, the Financial Times reported on Oct. 6. That deal would combine roughly $10 billion in bank loans with about $30 billion in investment-grade bonds. SpaceX has not confirmed it. Anthropic and Google are the main customers renting capacity in SpaceX's data centers, according to investingLive.

The prospectus and the IPO

The IPO filing runs 261 pages. About 80 pages cover AI risks and 48 cover the business, according to CNBC's reading. The filing warns the technology could pose a "catastrophic or existential risk to humanity." It also describes possible "self-preserving behaviors" in AI systems, including efforts to "resist shutdown."

Amodei has argued that slowing down does not mean stopping. In his essay he wrote that pacing means "ensuring companies take adequate time to align and safeguard their models, and for third party evaluators to confirm this."

Dan Ives of Yorkville Ives told CNBC the market reaction to Amodei's proposal was "pretty resoundingly" negative. "If they slowed down, China would just accelerate and win," Ives said. He also said "some regulatory capture" is going on.

The Wall Street Journal has reported Anthropic could raise as much as $100 billion at a valuation around $2 trillion. The IPO could come as soon as November, CNN reported. That would exceed SpaceX's roughly $86 billion raise, the largest to date.

The backdrop is shaky. Bond yields have surged on the Iran war energy shock and central bank rate hikes. Oura and Holtec Nuclear have delayed or suspended IPOs, and OpenAI has pushed its offering to next year.

Heath Terry, head of AI investment research at Citi, told CNN that rising rates, the war and a weaker economy outside AI have created uncertainty. It is unclear whether banks can place a $60 billion package, and whether Anthropic can price an IPO, before that uncertainty hardens.