Why AI's Compute Boom Now Runs on Debt, Not Equity

Analysis

The Deal Behind the Number

Broadcom is in talks with a group of lenders to finance a special-purpose vehicle (SPV) that will buy Broadcom's custom AI chips and lease them to Anthropic, [24/7 Wall St. reported](https://247wallst.com/investing/2026/08/24/broadcoms-60-billion-ai-debt-deal-hides-a-370-billion-question-nobody-on-wall-street-wants-to-answer/) on August 24, corroborated by Yahoo Finance. Anthropic never buys the chips outright -- investors finance the purchase through the SPV, then lease the hardware to Anthropic, which pays for compute capacity rather than owning the underlying silicon. The proposed structure:

This isn't Broadcom's first vehicle of this kind. Pulse previously covered an earlier version of this financing push on August 20, when Broadcom was reportedly discussing debt to cover both Anthropic and OpenAI chip production, with Anthropic alone expected to account for more than 40% of the volume. This week's talks build specifically on the AI XPV partnership Broadcom struck with Apollo and Blackstone in June. How the numbers have moved since:

• August 20 estimate -- up to $100 billion, covering both Anthropic and OpenAI chip production
• June AI XPV opening deal -- $35 billion, with Apollo and Blackstone
• Bank of America's 2029 exposure estimate -- roughly $370 billion, growing each time the deal is reported on

Debt Is Doing What Equity Used To Do

The mechanism matters more than the headline figure. A venture round dilutes a company's cap table and prices risk directly into a valuation everyone can see. An SPV lease structure does neither -- the debt sits on a separate legal entity's books, not Broadcom's and not Anthropic's, and the chips never appear as a capital expenditure on either company's balance sheet the way a direct purchase would. That's precisely the pattern regulators have started flagging: Pulse has tracked roughly $3 trillion in off-balance-sheet AI financing obligations at nine major tech giants as of late August, nearly double a July estimate, with Fed officials publicly split on how worried to be about it.

Anthropic's own numbers explain why lenders are willing to underwrite this much debt against one customer -- a growth curve that makes a multi-year chip lease look more like financing a proven revenue stream than a speculative infrastructure bet. The two data points lenders are underwriting against:

• ARR run rate -- $65 billion in July, up from roughly $9 billion a year earlier
• Last private round -- a Series H in August at a $965 billion post-money valuation

Debt Isn't the Only Structure Expanding

What makes this week worth writing about as a trend rather than a single deal is that debt-financed infrastructure is expanding alongside, not instead of, straight equity. XPeng's robotics unit raised new equity the same week -- the largest single-round private financing in China's embodied-AI industry, led by IDG Capital with Tencent and Alibaba as strategic backers. That's a conventional priced equity round, with dilution and a public valuation mark, running in parallel with Broadcom's off-balance-sheet chip financing. Nvidia, meanwhile, is separately assembling its own financing pool with BlackRock, Blackstone, KKR, Apollo, Brookfield and Goldman Sachs -- a hybrid between vendor financing and a capital-markets instrument designed to help its own customers afford its chips. The scale of each vehicle:

• XPeng Robotics raise -- $900M+ at a $6.3B post-money valuation
• Nvidia financing pool -- $500B
• Broadcom SPV (this deal) -- $60B+, up to $100B across the full structure

The Counterweight

The bear case here isn't that AI infrastructure spending is fake -- Anthropic's revenue growth is real and independently reported, and XPeng's raise came from IDG Capital and two of China's largest strategic tech investors, not speculative retail money. The risk is structural: SPV debt shifts default risk onto lenders and bondholders rather than onto the sponsor's own balance sheet, and every dollar of that risk is priced on the assumption that Anthropic's revenue curve keeps compounding at something close to its current rate for years, not quarters. Bank of America's $370 billion exposure estimate by 2029 is itself an admission that nobody has fully modeled what happens to this structure if AI demand growth merely slows to a normal SaaS growth rate rather than continuing to double.

What It Means for Founders, GPs and LPs

For founders raising into this environment, the practical read is that the largest AI infrastructure buildouts are increasingly decoupled from traditional venture math -- Anthropic isn't buying chips with a Series H check, it's leasing them through a lender-financed vehicle, which means the compute capacity available to frontier labs is growing faster than their own equity raises would suggest. For LPs, the diligence question worth asking any fund with AI infrastructure exposure is which tranche of which SPV they're actually underwriting, and what covenant protects them if a single customer's revenue growth stalls -- the junior tranche and the senior tranche do not carry the same risk, no matter how the headline number gets reported.