Broadcom Lent Anthropic $42B to Lease Its Own Chips
Broadcom Lent Anthropic $42B to Lease Its Own Chips A chipmaker is lending a startup $42 billion so the startup can lease that chipmaker's own chips — and then warning investors that the whole arrangement is a potential conflict of interest. Read that sentence again. It does not get saner the second time. This is the strangest financing structure Silicon Valley has produced in years, and Broadcom and Anthropic signed it with straight faces. The details surfaced on October 1 in a Reuters exclusive drawn from Anthropic's IPO prospectus. The Claude maker's filing — the document that will take the company public at a hoped-for valuation above $2 trillion — discloses that Broadcom has agreed to lend Anthropic up to $42 billion to finance infrastructure spending. The money comes via convertible notes. Those notes could cover roughly a third of the $125.2 billion that Anthropic has committed to spend leasing tensor processing unit compute capacity over five years. So: Broadc...