A Broadcom-backed special-purpose vehicle is in talks to raise $70 billion to $80 billion in debt to finance artificial-intelligence chip deals, including leases for Anthropic, CNBC confirmed Friday, citing sources. The structure under discussion pairs a senior tranche of roughly $45 billion with junior debt near $35 billion. Blackstone and Apollo are in the conversations. [1] Bloomberg's account of the same talks, first reported Thursday, floats a total as high as $100 billion depending on final shape. [2]
The vehicle exists so the borrowing does not sit on anyone's famous balance sheet. An SPV buys the chips, leases them to Anthropic, holds the debt, and keeps the lease payments flowing as operating expense rather than interest expense for the tenant. The template comes straight from June, when Apollo and Blackstone closed a $35 billion financing for Anthropic compute in three tranches, roughly half syndicated to outside investors. Broadcom backstops that deal's senior notes with what the documents call residual value support: if Anthropic stops paying its lease, the SPV sells the used chips, and if the resale proceeds fall short, Broadcom pays the gap for the senior holders. [3]
Read that clause twice, because it is the load-bearing one. Broadcom designs the chips Google produces for these data centers. Its revenue depends on shipping more of them. Its solvency depends on the buildout continuing. And it is now the insurer of last resort for the resale value of its own product, which means the credit quality of the debt is a levered bet on demand for the very silicon the debt financed. A chipmaker has become the lender of last resort for its own customers.
Friday's talks are not an isolated extravagance. Nvidia disclosed plans to commit up to $105 billion to finance OpenAI's Ohio data center project and is pushing a half-trillion-dollar compute-as-asset-class program with six asset managers. [4] Across the market, hyperscaler and AI-adjacent debt issuance hit roughly $220 billion this year against $12.5 billion in the comparable stretch of 2025. Investors have begun to flinch. Technology bond spreads now trade 89 basis points wide of the overall investment-grade index after years inside it, Amazon's recent $25 billion deal priced near double last year's equivalent spread, and Schroders' Neil Sutherland said the quiet part loud: indigestion is showing up in tech spreads. [2]
That is the loop worth seeing. The same week the credit market started charging AI more to borrow, the industry answered by building a bigger machine to borrow anyway, guaranteed by a chipmaker whose guarantee is worth less the moment AI capex contracts. Mainstream deal coverage reports each structure standalone, scale records and tranche sizes, and treats vendor financing as a word too impolite to print. X needs no invitation: the circular-financing diagrams are already memes, the Cisco 1999 comparisons already threaded, the opacity complaints already filed. The meme is early, not wrong.
The counterargument deserves its say, because the people structuring these vehicles are not careless. Lease income from a tenant racing toward an IPO is real collateral. Investment-grade ratings on the senior paper mean insurers and pensions can buy it, which is precisely why regulators and rating agencies will eventually be asked whether a chip designer's residual-value promise belongs in retirement portfolios at all. SiliconANGLE's Friday assessment cuts to politics: the buildout is now too big to fail quietly, which means Washington is implicitly a party to every one of these covenants whether Congress voted for it or not. [4][5]
What happens next is mechanical. If the raise prices, expect the model to replicate across every lab that needs chips it cannot finance from cash flow. If it stalls, the indigestion spreads from bonds into private credit, where there is no tape to watch. Either way the question Friday's numbers pose is no longer whether AI can build fast enough. It is who is holding the bag labeled resale value when the leasing stops.
-- THEO KAPLAN, San Francisco