Broadcom lines up $63bn bank financing for Anthropic TPU purchases

Four banks have committed $63bn in loans to finance Anthropic's purchase of Google Tensor Processing Units (TPUs, Google's AI accelerator chips) developed by Broadcom. Bank of America, Blackstone, Citigroup and Morgan Stanley signed the agreement, according to a Wall Street Journal report. The transaction is known internally as Project North Star.

The structure is unusual. Broadcom, a chipmaker rather than a lender, engineered the deal and carries a large part of the downside. Hock Tan, Broadcom's chief executive, spent two months organizing it. He held talks with the banks over the weekend of October 24–25 to secure their final commitment.

Who carries the risk?

The banks accepted higher interest rates on the loans. In exchange, Broadcom offered guarantees that protect them from losses if Anthropic defaults. That promise is not a footnote. It covers the first-lien (senior, secured) portion of the financing.

The deal executes through a newly formed special purpose vehicle (SPV), a standalone legal entity created solely to hold the debt and assets. Bank of America, Citi and Morgan Stanley arrange the first lien. Blackstone is the sole provider of the committed second-lien portion. Broadcom provides residual value support to the SPV equal to the amount of the first-lien financing.

What Broadcom did not disclose, at least in this report, is the size of its own exposure beyond that first-lien backstop, or how the guarantee is priced against its balance sheet. A $63bn financing arranged by a chip supplier, with the supplier absorbing senior-tranche risk, has no obvious precedent in the semiconductor industry.

What is the money buying?

The loans fund a strategic compute capacity agreement between Broadcom and Anthropic, previously announced. Delivery of the chips is expected to start in 2027.

In April 2026, Anthropic signed a deal with Broadcom and Google for 3.5 gigawatts of Google TPUs, also slated to come online from 2027. Anthropic said at the time that the "vast majority of the new compute" would sit in the United States. The purchase forms part of its November 2025 pledge to invest $50bn in US compute infrastructure.

What did the S-1 reveal?

Anthropic filed its S-1 IPO paperwork on October 26. The filing discloses $417bn in compute commitments as of December 2025. "These primarily consist of leases for compute equipment and data centers and purchase commitments with certain cloud providers, commencing between 2026 and 2027 with terms ranging from less than one year to 20 years," the filing read.

The scale is difficult to overstate. The $417bn commitment pile is roughly 25 times the company's H1 2026 revenue of $16.3bn, which itself grew 1,300 percent year on year. Anthropic reported a net loss of $80.7bn for the first half of 2026, though $72.4bn of that stemmed from a one-off accounting charge. Strip that out, and the picture improves sharply: operating losses narrowed to $693m from $2.1bn in the same period of 2025. The company also carries $6.2bn in debt.

Anthropic will list on the Nasdaq under the ticker ANT. No date for the offering was given in the report.

What remains unanswered?

The report does not state the interest rates the banks secured, the tenor of the loans, or the split between first- and second-lien tranches. It does not say whether Broadcom's guarantee is capped. Those omissions matter. If Anthropic's compute bets underperform, the loss lands first on Broadcom, a supplier with its own shareholders to answer to. Project North Star shifts financing risk off the AI company and onto its chip vendor. The banks priced for that. Whether investors in both companies have, remains to be seen.