Broadcom's guarantee on Anthropic's chips just got a market price: 275 basis points

The price of a chipmaker's signature

Broadcom's signature is worth 275 basis points ¹³. The $35 billion package Apollo and Blackstone closed in June to expand Anthropic's compute on Broadcom chips came priced two ways: senior portions carrying Broadcom's credit support yield about 5.75 percent, junior pieces without it 8.5↗ ¹. Same chips, same customer, same decade of leases. The only variable is who eats the loss.

Underneath is a fight over how long a chip keeps earning. Jensen Huang says up to a decade, the big clouds assume about six years, Michael Burry says two to three ³. Nothing in any filing settles it; the spread is the argument in code.

What Anthropic's own filing admits

Chip-backed debt has always leaned on contracts, not silicon. CoreWeave's $8.5 billion GPU loan drew an A3 rating and roughly 5.9 percent pricing↗ because Meta's payments stand behind it ³.

Anthropic's confidential prospectus, filed in June and still absent from EDGAR↗, lays out at least $518 billion of decade-long compute commitments, about 80 percent of it non-cancelable or payable whether or not the machines run ⁴. Broadcom's $161.2 billion of lease obligations is the largest single line in the filing, ahead of Google, Amazon and Microsoft ⁴.

On top of the leases sits the $42 billion convertible note Broadcom agreed to extend, about a third of a $125.2 billion five-year rental of TPU capacity; the instruments could be converted into Anthropic shares, and none are expected to be sold before the IPO ⁵. Anthropic deposited cash into a restricted account for Broadcom's benefit in April, and the filing itself flags "potential conflicts of interest" in the dual role ⁵. A payment default would accelerate a chunk of the leases and shut off the facility ⁵.

One customer, a year of revenue

Broadcom is now assembling $60 billion more: banks hold syndication letters for a $42 billion senior-secured tranche, and Blackstone leads an $18 billion junior piece with $9 billion of its own capital ⁷. That would nearly double total debt to about $126.5 billion, and the $102 billion riding on Anthropic stands against about $106 billion of expected fiscal 2026 revenue ⁸.

"Nvidia is putting in place a massive amount of its balance sheet, and Broadcom is having to follow suit↗," Seaport analyst Jay Goldberg said ⁵. Nvidia's machine, announced 10 August with six asset managers, moves more than $500 billion of third-party capital, and lenders are already demanding stronger guarantees than its first outline offered ⁹³.

Big projections, hard claims

The bull case is real: Anthropic becomes Broadcom's largest compute customer next year, Broadcom projects about $230 billion of AI semiconductor revenue in fiscal 2028, and analysts model $272 billion of total revenue ⁵⁸. The leases are non-cancelable except in default, so Broadcom holds hard claims ⁴. But a guarantee moves risk, it does not delete it.

The mid-November decision

Anthropic brings $11.6 billion of Q2 revenue and its first positive adjusted operating profit to a listing reportedly possible as early as mid-November, at about $2 trillion↗ ¹⁰⁸⁶. The notes could convert into shares at the listing, and whether to is Broadcom's choice ⁵¹⁰. Convert at $2 trillion and it owns a slice of its biggest customer; hold the debt and it stays senior creditor to one whose slowdown would devalue the very chips securing the loan. The collateral is worth the most while Anthropic is buying, and the least the day it stops.