Broadcom has agreed to lend Anthropic up to $42 billion through a convertible note, according to Anthropic's IPO prospectus as reported by Reuters. The money finances chip leases. Anthropic has committed $125.2 billion over five years for tensor processing unit capacity, and the note could cover about a third of it, per Dealroom's summary of the filing. Capacity starts arriving in 2027.
A date is taking shape. Anthropic is weighing a listing as soon as mid-November, with formal marketing possible the week of November 9 and an investor meeting on October 14, per Bloomberg's reporting via Yahoo Finance. The target valuation runs up to $2 trillion. No notes are expected to be sold before the IPO completes, so the Broadcom money arrives after public holders are in. A $42 billion note that converts into shares can put the chip supplier on the cap table, and the new shareholders carry that dilution.
Anthropic's own risk factors name the problem. The filing warns that Broadcom's "dual role as hardware supplier and financing partner creates potential conflicts of interest," and that a payment default could accelerate lease obligations while limiting access to the facility. We covered the same shape on September 27, when Nvidia committed $1 billion of convertibles to Nscale, an Anthropic landlord. Vendor money now funds vendor sales at every layer of the stack.
OpenAI is running the private version. It is reportedly in talks to raise at least $30 billion at about $1.4 trillion as a bridge to a 2027 listing, per TechCrunch. Broadcom expects Anthropic to be its largest compute customer in 2027.
Bottom Line
The prospectus puts a number on vendor financing: $42 billion against a $125.2 billion lease. If you plan to buy at the IPO, read the conversion terms and the default clause first. A supplier that is also the lender decides who gets chips when payments slip.