Hock Tan sells the chips the AI boom runs on, and on Monday he told a conference in Singapore that chips are no longer what holds it back. “[What] I think might be the biggest constraint is capital,” the Broadcom chief executive said, ranking money ahead of chips and power. The coverage read it as a forecast about the industry. It is also a fair description of his own customer list.
Broadcom designs custom AI chips for six customers, and on its September earnings call Tan said it was building financing vehicles for two of them. His finance chief, Amie Thuener, described the job as helping the leading AI labs bridge the gap between their current cash flow and the up-front investment their businesses require. The paper trail started in June, when Broadcom, Apollo and Blackstone struck a $35 billion deal to expand Anthropic’s computing capacity on Broadcom chips.
In August, Bloomberg reported talks on more than $60 billion more, with Broadcom guaranteeing part of the senior debt. On October 1, Reuters reported from Anthropic’s IPO filing that Broadcom has agreed to lend it up to $42 billion — about a third of a $125.2 billion, five-year lease of chip capacity. Last week Bloomberg reported early talks on roughly $30 billion so OpenAI can buy the chips the two are developing together. The company naming money as the scarce input has become one of the places its buyers go to get it.
Tan has not hidden the logic. “It makes economic sense for Broadcom to invest and enable these guys,” he said on the call, and Anthropic is expected to become Broadcom’s largest compute customer in 2027. But none of this looks like a company stretching to make a sale. Broadcom posted a record $13.7 billion of free cash flow in its third quarter alone, which is the cash left after running the business and paying for equipment. Four of its six chip customers pay their own way. And the $42 billion has not moved: Anthropic says it does not expect any of the notes to be sold before its IPO. It is a promise of money, not money.
What’s interesting is the fine print around that promise. The filing warns that certain payment or performance defaults could make a large share of the lease obligations due at once, while limiting Anthropic’s ability to use the $42 billion facility to cover them — which suggests the financing is hardest to reach in exactly the scenario where it would matter most.
For two years the shortages in AI were things you could hold. The one Hock Tan named on Monday is money, and the company he runs has started supplying that too.
The company naming money as the scarce input has become one of the places its buyers go to get it.
