Headlines

Broadcom (AVGO) says a new special purpose vehicle will purchase Broadcom XPU AI accelerators and networking solutions for Anthropic; deliveries expected to start in 2027

Newsquawk Staff ·

  • Bank of America (BAC), Citi (C) and Morgan Stanley (MS) arrange first lien, Blackstone (BX) provides second lien financing.
  • Blackstone says it is the sole provider of the committed portion of the second lien financing.

What it means

The structure is the story: a special purpose vehicle purchasing accelerators for onward deployment to an AI lab, financed with first lien from banks and second lien from private credit, sits squarely in the wave of off-balance-sheet, asset-backed AI infrastructure financing that has been building over recent quarters. Comparable episodes have followed a familiar sequence: equity story first, then scrutiny shifts to the credit stack, who holds residual risk, whether the underlying hardware collateral depreciates faster than the debt amortises, and how dependent repayment is on a single end-user's compute demand. The presence of large banks at the senior level and a private credit provider alone on the committed second lien is itself a tell about how risk is being partitioned, with junior capital absorbing the obsolescence question. The split worth watching is between deals where the end customer is contractually on the hook for take-or-pay style commitments and those where the SPV carries merchant exposure; that distinction has historically separated durable structures from problem credits. Follow-ons are the terms not disclosed here: tenor, amortisation profile, residual value assumptions on the accelerators, and whether other chip-vendor or hyperscaler arrangements replicate the template. Deliveries not starting for an extended period means near-term revenue recognition and credit performance remain theoretical.

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