Broadcom Seeks More Than $60 Billion in Latest AI Debt Deal

**Ryan Gould** (0:02)
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**Carol Massar** (0:32)
One of the things we want to get to too, is a story that we've been keeping an eye on, and that has to do with Broadcom, and the company apparently in talks with a group of lenders to raise more than $60 billion in debt for an AI chip financing deal that will benefit Anthropic and other companies according to people with knowledge of the matter. This right through, let me just see it hit just after the closing bell, and just real quickly, let me just pull it up and see if we've seen. Yeah, you do see shares of Broadcom just up about four-tenths of a percent or so here in the aftermarket. We should get to it with Ryan Gould.
He is Bloomberg News Deal Reporter, and he is in the Bloomberg News Washington DC Bureau. Hey, busy, busy guy. These deals, Fast and Furious. Tell us about Broadcom. Ryan, what did you find out?

**Ryan Gould** (1:21)
Yeah, sure. Good to see you, Carol, as always. I think this one is, if this comes to light, comes to pass, this would be among the largest that we've seen of this type of deal. I want to just throw us back a little bit to June when we saw Broadcom announced that partnership with Blackstone and Apollo, where essentially they were looking to strike an agreement to provide 20 gigawatts of compute globally for AI deployment. I mean, I think you could probably see this as some kind of extension of that agreement of sorts. This would essentially see Blackstone and Apollo participate again per our sourcing and reporting in a deal that could essentially see Broadcom line up as much as $100 billion in debt. I mean, when you put that together, it's sort of $30 billion being provided by Apollo and Blackstone. And then Broadcom itself essentially looking at maybe backstopping such guaranteeing somewhere in the region of $60 to $70 billion per sourcing. So not insignificant. And I think this is kind of where the trend is sort of heading right now, which is just this insatiable need for AI compute to use the jargon.

**Carol Massar** (2:23)
And I will just say, the market takes it, or we'll see, right? I think ultimately, that's what we continue to watch if there's the investor appetite. But as we talked earlier at the beginning of our broadcast with Ira Jersey and Michael McKenzie, investors are offering these corporate offerings for debt are higher than what you're seeing maybe in treasuries and potentially crowding out increasingly the interest, I should say, when it comes to treasury demand.

**Emily Graffeo** (2:51)
Yeah, Ryan, I mean, do we have an understanding yet of like, what kind of debt this would take form of? I mean, we know that Blackstone and Apollo will be leading the financing, but you have to imagine that they're going to be several different tranches and they'll be selling this to other institutional investors, right?

**Ryan Gould** (3:10)
Totally, yeah. So, I mean, in the story we just put out that just crossed a short while ago, I mean, I think the best way to probably think about this is that the Blackstone and Apollo piece will be a junior piece and then sort of chunk the slug that Broadcom is looking to, you know, that that 60 billion piece, if you will, is going to be, you know, senior secured. And they are out to banks, among others, as part of that group, you know, that you would have to expect that there would be a number of banks here that would be looking to help Broadcom with this. Because I think, you know, if you think about the, just the sort of cost of providing something on this scale, I mean, Broadcom is looking to do this as efficiently as possible. And Hock Tan, the CEO of Broadcom, is known for this very, very intricate kind of financial engineering. And in fact, I think Broadcom has become kind of an industry leader in this, in this part of the sort of chips financing space.
So, I mean, when you sort of think about this in the round, this is kind of unprecedented. But if anyone's going to pull this something like this off, this would be Broadcom.

**Emily Graffeo** (4:07)
It definitely just shows, right, Ryan, like how expensive it is for these companies to build out all of the AI infrastructure with that prior deal that Blackstone and Apollo led. It was $35 billion.