Broadcom is in talks with lenders to raise more than $60 billion in debt—the largest AI infrastructure financing facility on record—with Anthropic named as the primary beneficiary. The deal converts Broadcom from chip vendor into infrastructure banker, underwriting compute capacity before models are trained. Hock Tan is betting $60 billion that the marginal cost of intelligence drops faster than the cost of capital.

The facility finances AI chip deployments to Anthropic and unnamed others, likely structured as vendor financing with Broadcom retaining title until payment milestones clear. This is not a loan to Anthropic. It is Broadcom pre-building the data center and collecting rent. The debt sits on Broadcom's balance sheet. The compute sits in Anthropic's inference stack. The spread between Broadcom's borrowing cost—call it 5.8% on investment-grade paper—and the effective yield on multi-year AI compute contracts determines whether this prints money or becomes the sector's first margin call.

The number matters because it exceeds the $50 billion Microsoft committed to OpenAI's infrastructure over five years and dwarfs the $4 billion Amazon extended to Anthropic in convertible notes. Broadcom is not writing a check. It is issuing paper against future chip deliveries, turning semiconductor manufacturing into a financing business. The model works if Anthropic's inference revenue scales faster than depreciation on custom silicon. If it doesn't, Broadcom owns the most expensive doorstops in Northern California.

Two follow-on effects allocators should watch. First, this debt facility implies Anthropic's inference demand exceeds what public cloud can economically provide. If Anthropic needs $60 billion in owned-and-operated silicon, the unit economics of renting H100 clusters from AWS no longer pencil. That is a 20-30% margin improvement if the depreciation schedule holds, but it also means Anthropic is locked into Broadcom's roadmap. Second, every other frontier lab is now repricing their cost-of-compute assumptions. If Anthropic gets vendor-financed infrastructure, Meta and xAI will demand equivalent terms. Broadcom just turned the chip oligopoly into a balance-sheet war.

Operators should track three events in the next 90-120 days. One: whether Goldman and JPMorgan, Broadcom's usual syndicate leads, can actually place $60 billion in AI-linked debt without triggering a credit rating review. Two: Anthropic's next model release, likely Claude 4, which will signal whether inference volume justifies this level of capital deployment. Three: Broadcom's Q2 earnings call in early June, where Tan will either defend the debt load or quietly restructure the terms.

The closing fact is this: Broadcom's debt-to-EBITDA just moved from 1.8x to an estimated 3.2x if this facility prices. That is higher than any semiconductor peer and closer to data-center REIT leverage. Hock Tan is no longer running a chip company. He is running a compute lessor with a fabrication subsidiary.