Anthropic owes everyone, no profit for years. Chips are rented, money is borrowed and the revenue is a forecast.

Anthropic brought in $16.96 billion in revenue during the third quarter. It also has roughly $900.9 billion in contractual commitments, most of it tied to compute and infrastructure. Buried in that mountain is $161.2 billion in Broadcom equipment leases, largely non-cancelable.

The financing deserves a closer look. Bank of America, Citi, Morgan Stanley and Blackstone are backing a $63 billion SPV that buys Broadcom AI accelerators and networking equipment, then leases it to Anthropic. Broadcom is providing residual-value support, with potential exposure reaching roughly $43.5 billion. Separately, Broadcom has agreed to make up to $42 billion in convertible notes available to Anthropic, restricted to paying rent on the equipment. Those notes can convert into Anthropic shares.

So Broadcom sells the hardware, helps support the financing behind the equipment, and provides Anthropic with a financing facility to pay the rent. Wall Street finances the vehicle buying the equipment. Anthropic needs its AI business to generate enough revenue to carry the commitments.

That’s the circular financing risk. It doesn’t mean the deals will fail, and Anthropic’s growth is real. But the structure ties the fortunes of the customer, chip supplier, lenders and equipment lessors together in a way that could get ugly if demand or AI spending falls short. The Lucent and Nortel comparison is worth making: vendor-supported demand can make an infrastructure boom look healthier than the underlying economics really are.

https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/2130357/000162828026072484/anthropicpbc-sx1ax2.htm

https://www.blackstone.com/news/press/bank-of-america-blackstone-citi-and-morgan-stanley-announce-landmark-63-billion-financing-structure-to-enable-ai-compute/

https://investors.broadcom.com/static-files/0ee4f6b7-4a23-4de0-8f3e-48f147ae30d3

https://www.reuters.com/legal/transactional/wall-street-banks-blackstone-line-up-63-billion-finance-broadcom-chips-anthropic-2026-10-26/

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