Four months after Anthropic paid 8.5 percent on a chip financing, Broadcom sits at the center of a larger one priced above 10 percent. Enterprise buyers should read the capital structure as part of the vendor contract.

Four months after raising about $4.4 billion at an 8.5 percent interest rate (NewsBytes), Anthropic is offering Blackstone more than 10 percent to anchor $9 billion of junior debt in a $60 billion chip financing code-named Project North Star (FourWeekMBA). Blackstone-managed funds would take half of an $18 billion junior tranche, and Anthropic would offer the remaining $9 billion to other investors (NewsBytes). About $42 billion of senior debt carries Broadcom's backing. The money funds about 1.5 gigawatts of Google tensor processing units, or TPUs, that Anthropic leases for five years (Cuviliez).

People familiar with the negotiations gave these terms to the Financial Times, and the package has not closed.

Anthropic's cost of chip debt is moving toward 10 percent

Junior lenders absorb losses first, and 10 percent is what that seat costs.

Part of the jump comes from size. An $18 billion junior slice carries more exposure than the $4.5 billion junior tranche in the Apollo-led compute financing from June, which priced at 8.5 percent while the Broadcom-backed senior A2 tranche priced at 5.75 percent (Hutcheson). Similarly rated issuers pay about 7 percent, according to the Financial Times figures relayed by FourWeekMBA. The $4.4 billion and $4.5 billion figures sit close enough that they may describe the same instrument, and the reporting does not say.

Epoch AI researcher Campbell Hutcheson reads the 2.75-point gap between A2 and the junior tranche as an upper bound on what Broadcom's backstop is worth, because seniority and support arrive together and cannot be priced apart (Hutcheson).

The lessor of Anthropic's chips would become its lender

Broadcom co-designs the TPUs with Google and leases the capacity to Anthropic. Anthropic's initial public offering filing adds a third role, lender, with up to $42 billion in convertible notes that could become Anthropic shares and would cover about a third of the $125.2 billion five-year lease commitment (Reuters).

Anthropic's own prospectus names "potential conflicts of interest" (Reuters) and says Broadcom's pricing and hardware decisions could affect the computing capacity Anthropic can secure (AI Weekly). Robert Leitao of Rothschild & Co told Reuters the financing wave amounts to a concentrated bet on two companies producing enough revenue to carry it.

Two numbers need reconciling before anyone treats the exposure as settled. Reuters describes a $42 billion convertible facility from Broadcom, and the Financial Times describes $42 billion of senior debt that Broadcom backs. The reporting does not say whether those are one commitment or two, and the filing leaves the conversion price and the possible co-lender unnamed (AI Weekly). Add the $29 billion ceiling on Broadcom's reported exposure in the June financing (Hutcheson), and cumulative backstop becomes the figure to ask about.

Lenders have backed this structure at scale, and 2027 is the first test

Hutcheson counts close to $50 billion of debt tied to Anthropic's buildout and concludes that financing is unlikely to be the immediate limit on frontier compute, in part because lenders took $4.5 billion of exposure to Anthropic with no supplier backstop (Hutcheson). Anthropic's annualized revenue rose from about $9 billion at the end of 2025 to more than $47 billion by May 2026, according to figures Epoch AI attributes to Anthropic (Hutcheson).

Next-generation TPU capacity starts arriving in 2027, the year Anthropic is expected to become Broadcom's largest compute customer (Reuters). Lenders are underwriting whether revenue keeps pace with a $125.2 billion commitment, and the 2027 deployments are the first large block of capacity to arrive on that bet.

Enterprise buyers inherit the default mechanics of the lease

In the June structure, if Anthropic stops paying, Broadcom can take over the lease or arrange a sale of the racks (Hutcheson). Either path changes who provides the capacity. A buyer with a multiyear Claude commitment holds a contract with Anthropic, and the hardware behind it sits in a vehicle with its own creditors and its own default terms.

Nothing in the reporting points to a default, and the revenue trajectory argues against one.