Broadcom Eyes $50 Billion of Debt for OpenAI, on Top of Anthropic's $60 Billion
Both frontier-lab customers now appear to have Broadcom-linked financing in motion, with $110 billion of reported raises against $48.96 billion of net debt today.
Broadcom is reportedly pursuing a $50 billion debt financing to fund AI chips for a major AI research laboratory. This is a different customer and a different pool of money from the $60 billion raise for Anthropic. Nothing in the report says whether the two overlap, what the instrument is, or whose balance sheet carries it.
Add the two and the reported total is $110 billion, which exceeds the $70 billion to $100 billion debt package reported last month. Either that package was always meant for more than one customer, or these are separate raises. Both readings are worse than the one I originally saw.
The leverage arithmetic follows the earlier signals, net debt is $48.96 billion and EBITDA is about $35 billion. If the $50 billion alone lands on Broadcom's balance sheet, leverage moves from 1.4 times to about 2.8 times. With both raises held in-house, net debt reaches about $159 billion, or 4.5 times. If an off-balance-sheet vehicle carries them, the ratio stays clean while the roughly $29 billion guarantee book, whose ceiling management has refused three times to disclose, gets a larger neighbour.
One major AI laboratory's accelerator program is guided toward 1.3GW of 2027 deployment. At $11 billion to $12 billion of Broadcom content per gigawatt, that is roughly $14 billion to $16 billion of chip revenue. A $50 billion raise is several times that figure. Broadcom would be financing more than its own content, or the facility covers more than 1.3GW. However, from reading the report I am unsure which.
This pushes the counterparty pillar from one lab to two. Both borrowers burn cash, and Broadcom's financing now runs through both.
What do people think about this?