Wall Street has found a new way to pay for the AI buildout: lend against the chips themselves. A newly formed special purpose vehicle with committed financing from Bank of America, Blackstone, Citi and Morgan Stanley will buy Broadcom XPU accelerators and networking gear and lease them to Anthropic, with deliveries expected to begin in calendar 2027, the release said. The structure layers the risk. Senior debt put together by Bank of America, Citi and Morgan Stanley sits atop a second-lien layer that Blackstone alone has committed to fund, and the chipmaker itself stands behind the vehicle with residual value support sized to match that senior debt. Anthropic gains compute capacity without carrying the full purchase price on its own books. The lenders, in turn, hold chips as collateral and a chipmaker's promise as a cushion.

The deal is the second tranche of a program Broadcom set up this summer. In June the company launched what it calls the AI XPV platform with Apollo and Blackstone, closing a first $35 billion tranche for a one-gigawatt Anthropic deployment and targeting more than 20 gigawatts of compute capacity through 2028, according to company press release. Broadcom designs custom accelerators for a small number of large customers rather than selling a general-purpose chip. Those customers include the frontier labs whose orders now drive its growth. Those labs need the hardware years before their own cash flows can cover the cost of buying it outright.

Lending a chipmaker's credit to its customers carries a price. Broadcom's quarterly report filed in September said the backstop increases its counterparty credit risk exposure, while management described the probability of a residual value guarantee being triggered as low, as per the company. The arrangement belongs to a broader wave of so-called 'circular financing', in which a supplier helps fund purchases of its own products. Nvidia and Meta have used related off-balance-sheet structures, and bond investors have grown more selective about them this year. The Anthropic order is the largest such test for Broadcom. Syndication of the senior loans behind it began earlier this month, and the cost of insuring Broadcom's debt against default had more than tripled since late May, IFR reported. Investors will watch how the debt is priced as it is sold down.