The party footing the bill for the big AI labs' compute is no longer just the lab itself: Broadcom, together with Apollo and Blackstone, has built a scheme in which the chipmaker guarantees up to $29 billion of debt so that Anthropic can lease Google-designed chips.
In June 2026, Broadcom, Apollo, and Blackstone launched an AI infrastructure financing platform. Its first tranche, $35 billion, is earmarked for Anthropic and aims to unlock more than one additional gigawatt of compute capacity. A financial vehicle buys the chips designed by Google (manufactured with Broadcom) and leases them to Anthropic, so the debt sits in that vehicle rather than on the company's balance sheet.
What's new is the scale of the risk the chipmaker is taking on. According to what Broadcom disclosed in its quarterly filings, the maximum potential liability of its backing is around $29 billion once all planned systems are deployed. It is a guarantee on the debt: it would be triggered if the customer defaulted on its lease payments and the value of the hardware didn't cover the losses.
The pattern keeps repeating across the industry: the chip or cloud supplier finances, guarantees, or invests in the customer who then buys from that same supplier. As long as the lab's revenue keeps growing, the arrangement holds; if it doesn't, the risk concentrates in a handful of balance sheets. This news comes on top of the IPO Anthropic is preparing (we covered its road to Nasdaq), which will force greater transparency about how these leases are accounted for.
Carlos Montiel is an enterprise AI solutions architect. He implements LLMs, Agents, RAG, and orchestrators for companies across Guatemala and Latin America. Reach out for a consultation.
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