Broadcom, the US chip designer, is lending up to $42 billion to Anthropic, the developer of the Claude AI models, to help pay for its computing build-out, according to Reuters.
The details emerged from Anthropic's IPO prospectus, which Reuters has seen.
Anthropic is expected to spend so heavily on Broadcom's technology that it will become the chip designer's largest computing customer by 2027.
Broadcom shares slipped about 1.4% in early New York trading.
Why Broadcom is doing it
Broadcom designs the Tensor Processing Units (TPUs), the custom AI chips that Google uses in its data centres.
In April, Anthropic agreed a deal with Google and Broadcom to use TPU capacity coming online from 2027.
The loan helps make sure that deal happens at full scale.
For Broadcom, it locks in its biggest customer for years ahead and gives it clear sight of future revenue.
Anthropic is also using Broadcom for equipment leasing and financing, not just chip purchases.
Lending to customers so they can buy your products, known as vendor financing, is common in capital-heavy industries where buyers cannot fund big orders upfront.
The circular worry
The deal adds Broadcom to a growing list of suppliers that also fund their customers.
Amazon, Google and Microsoft have all invested in Anthropic while selling it cloud computing capacity.
Nvidia and AMD have done similar deals with OpenAI and Anthropic.
Critics say the money goes round in a loop: the supplier funds the AI lab, and the lab hands the money back as revenue.
That can make demand for chips look stronger and more secure than it really is.
The risk is that if one AI lab runs into trouble, the losses ripple back through its suppliers and into the wider stock market.
Investors remember the telecoms boom of the late 1990s, when equipment makers such as Lucent and Nortel lent heavily to customers who later collapsed.
The numbers behind it
Anthropic's prospectus shows both rapid growth and heavy spending.
Revenue grew 12-fold in 2025 to nearly $4.6 billion, although the company made an operating loss of more than $8 billion.
Its reported net loss of around $42 billion included a charge of roughly $34 billion linked to financing that could later convert into shares, rather than cash spent running the business.
The company plans to spend $518 billion on cloud, computing and infrastructure commitments in the coming years.
It also warned that nearly a quarter of its revenue came from two customers, and that many large clients are not tied into long-term contracts.
The listing could value Anthropic at more than $2 trillion and is likely to come after November's US midterm elections.
For Broadcom, the bet is that Anthropic's revenue keeps growing fast enough to cover those commitments.
