Lenders line up $63 billion for Anthropic’s Broadcom chips

Four Wall Street firms are building a $63 billion financing vehicle to buy Broadcom’s custom AI accelerators and networking gear and lease them to Anthropic.

Bank of America, Blackstone, Citi and Morgan Stanley announced the deal Monday in a release posted by Broadcom. Deliveries are expected to start in calendar 2027.

The point: Anthropic gets chips without buying them outright. The vehicle owns the hardware. Broadcom stands behind part of its value.

How it works

A newly formed special purpose vehicle will buy Broadcom XPU AI accelerators and networking products and lease them to Anthropic, the release says. Bank of America, Citi and Morgan Stanley are arranging the first lien. Blackstone is the sole provider of the committed portion of the second lien.

Broadcom is giving the vehicle residual value support equal to the first-lien amount, according to the release. The deal is part of a compute agreement Broadcom announced earlier.

Broadcom’s investor deck puts numbers on that support. Peak exposure is expected to be $43 billion. It declines to zero on a straight line over five years of lease payments, in what the deck calls an illustrative schedule. Broadcom’s potential liability is any gap between 72.5% of what is owed on the lease and the value of the AI racks it gets back. The deck says the support “is not a direct cash outlay” and calls the chance of it being triggered low.

“Fundamentally, the need for AI compute continues to grow at an extraordinary pace,” Broadcom President and CEO Hock Tan said in the release. “This validates that there is capital available to finance such growth and that Broadcom is uniquely positioned to enable it.”

Our read: This is a way to fund AI compute without Anthropic buying the chips outright. The vehicle owns the racks, financed by the lenders. Anthropic pays rent. Broadcom sells chips now and takes a contingent risk later. That risk is real but bounded on paper. Broadcom only pays if the racks are worth less than 72.5% of the remaining lease balance when they come back, and the deck expects peak exposure of $43 billion, shrinking to zero. The deck lists layers ahead of Broadcom: Anthropic’s lease payments, the option to re-lease the gear and the hardware’s collateral value. Each layer depends on two things no one can know yet: that Anthropic keeps paying and that five-year-old AI accelerators still hold value. Tan says the deal shows there is capital to finance AI’s growth. It does show lenders will fund against today’s demand. Whether the demand holds for the life of the leases is the bet everyone in the structure is making.

Siri AI adds five languages

Apple’s 27.2 software updates bring Siri AI to French, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese and Spanish, Apple said in a Newsroom post Monday. It remains in beta.

Apple’s iOS 27.2 release notes say Siri AI can now recall past conversations. It can also draw on photos attached in Messages, Calendar event attendees, voicemails and Safari history and Reading List. A new Excluded Apps setting lets users choose which apps Siri, Search and suggestions can access. The features need iPhone 15 Pro, iPhone 15 Pro Max or any iPhone 16 or later, the notes say.

Siri AI is still unavailable in the EU on iOS, iPadOS and watchOS, Apple says, and is not available in mainland China, per the notes. Apple says Chinese (traditional), Norwegian, Turkish and Vietnamese come by year end. We covered the English beta launch in September.

Also

Meta priced its AI stock sale. Nico Valdez has the details.

What’s next

Broadcom hardware deliveries to the vehicle are expected to begin in 2027, according to the release. Apple’s next four Siri AI languages are due by the end of the year, Apple says.