Broadcom announced a financing deal to provide AI chips to Anthropic. The news lifted Broadcom's shares and boosted AI stocks, with the S&P 500 up 0.6% and the Nasdaq up 1.2%.
Bank of America, Blackstone, Citigroup and Morgan Stanley announced $63 billion in financing through a new SPV to purchase Broadcom AI accelerators and networking equipment to be leased to Anthropic, with chip deliveries expected to begin from 2027.
Speaking at the DBS Asia Future Forward conference in Singapore on Oct 12, Broadcom CEO Hock Tan compared many AI investors to casino gamblers who lack understanding of the technology but expect high returns. He cited OpenAI's $50 billion annualized revenue in September despite continued losses due to training costs as evidence that revenue growth does not equal a validated business model. Tan said capital has replaced chips, storage and power as the biggest constraint on AI, with wafer shortages likely to improve by 2028-2029 and computing supply-demand imbalance possibly lasting until 2029 or 2030, though demand could slow if model adoption disappoints.
Hock Tan said that as AI continues to develop, capital will become Broadcom's biggest constraint; the company is overcoming wafer and memory chip shortages, but capital remains the biggest limiting factor.
According to The Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg, Broadcom has been arranging over $50 billion in financing for OpenAI's custom AI chip project in recent weeks, with early talks involving private credit firms including Apollo Global Management and Blackstone. The discussions are at an early stage and the size may change. Broadcom and OpenAI previously announced a collaboration to develop a 10-gigawatt custom AI chip system, scheduled for deployment from the second half of 2026 through the end of 2029 under the internal codename Nexus.
Anthropic disclosed in its IPO prospectus that Broadcom has agreed to provide up to $42 billion in loans for infrastructure spending, with the debt instruments convertible into Anthropic shares. The amount covers about one-third of Anthropic's five-year $125.2 billion TPU lease commitments. Anthropic also warned of potential conflicts of interest given Broadcom's dual role as hardware supplier and lender.
FuriosaAI has revealed technical details of its third-generation AI inference accelerator, co-developed with Broadcom, featuring two 2nm compute dies, one I/O die, 12 48GB HBM4(E) memory stacks, PCIe Gen7 support, 32 PFLOPS compute, 576GB HBM capacity and 48TB/s bandwidth — representing 32x, 12x and 32x improvements over the second-gen RGND respectively.
Broadcom CEO Hock Tan responded to AI slowdown concerns, saying compute demand remains strong and reaffirming long-term revenue targets of $115 billion in AI semiconductor revenue for fiscal 2027 and $230 billion for fiscal 2028. He agreed AI needs governance but views it as a tool, not a living being, that will drive productivity gains.
After several AI executives proposed slowing the pace of AI development, global semiconductor stocks came under broad pressure, with an index of major companies including Nvidia and Broadcom falling 5%.
Anthropic's annual revenue exceeds $30 billion, up sharply from $9 billion at the end of 2025. Enterprise demand surges, with Claude AI services highly popular;