Broadcom seeks $100B to keep the AI chip boom alive

Broadcom is negotiating to secure over $60 billion, possibly up to $100 billion, to support the production of AI chips for Anthropic and its other clients. This transaction highlights the reality of how the development of AI across the world is being financed by loans rather than company funds.

Debt, not cash, is bankrolling the chips

The financing being discussed will be divided into various portions. One of these includes the junior debt portion estimated at about $30 billion. According to reports, Broadcom is also expected to guarantee part of its senior secured debt portion worth approximately $60 billion to $70 billion. The total amount of financing that will be raised is expected to reach $100 billion.

A special-purpose vehicle would issue the debt, keeping it off Broadcom’s own balance sheet. Blackstone and Apollo Global Management, two of Wall Street’s biggest private-credit firms, are also in talks to participate.

This is not a one-off transaction. Goldman Sachs Research predicts total debt issuance associated with AI could reach just under $500 billion by 2026. Credit strategist Amanda Lynam put it succinctly:

“It’s hard to overstate the importance of this theme in the credit markets, both in terms of its overall scale.”

The general conclusion is evident. The cost of developing AI infrastructure has reached a level at which even companies with enormous cash reserves do not want to cover the costs fully by themselves.

A financing model built to loosen Nvidia’s grip

What makes the financing strategically important is what Broadcom’s chips are designed to do. The company develops custom silicon for Alphabet and Meta and has supply agreements with Anthropic and OpenAI, as major AI players look to build their own accelerators and reduce their dependence on Nvidia.

Providing funding for such custom chips at this magnitude makes that option more achievable.

Nvidia is working towards a similar end from the other direction. The chip manufacturer reportedly announced in August that it had arranged funding with investment companies like Apollo, Blackstone, BlackRock, Brookfield, Goldman Sachs, and KKR. This was done in order to obtain over $500 billion in third-party financing.

That changes the nature of the AI chip race. Competition is increasingly about who can secure the cheapest and deepest pools of capital, not simply who can build the fastest processor.

The 20-gigawatt bet behind the numbers

The new raise builds on a model Broadcom established in June, when it, Apollo, and Blackstone launched a platform with an initial $35 billion transaction to expand Anthropic’s computing capacity by more than one gigawatt.

Ultimately, this collaboration’s objective is to bring 20+ gigawatts of compute capacity to frontier AI laboratories such as Anthropic and OpenAI by 2028. This news indicates that the new debt agreement might have the same shape as the previous ones.

The figures might become significantly bigger. According to Bank of America’s Tom Curcuruto, Broadcom’s chip financing facility could advance to $370 billion worth of senior debt by the middle of 2029, which would be used to finance 20 gigawatts of capacity.

The electricity requirement gives the scale some perspective. As Cryptopolitan mentioned in its April report, a one-gigawatt data center needs approximately the same amount of energy as one million homes in the US.

Broadcom’s AI revenue is already climbing fast

The borrowing comes as Broadcom’s AI business accelerates sharply. In its fiscal second quarter ended May 3, 2026, the company generated $10.8 billion in AI semiconductor revenue, up 143% from a year earlier.

CEO Hock Tan told investors he expects that figure to exceed $16 billion in the third quarter, representing growth of more than 200%. Total quarterly revenue reached $22.2 billion.

That growth helps in understanding the willingness of lenders to fund hardware on such a large scale. Broadcom is not merely speculating on future demand for AI since its current revenue already reveals how fast the demand is turning into chip sales.

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