Highlights
- Anthropic has agreed to lease $45 billion in data center capacity from Nscale, drawing 460 megawatts from a West Virginia campus tied to a $71 billion buildout.
- The deal adds to a leasing spree that already includes a $19 billion, 20-year TeraWulf agreement in Kentucky and a $9.1 billion lease in Rockdale, Texas.
- Broadcom is seeking more than $60 billion in debt, potentially reaching $100 billion with Blackstone and Apollo, to finance AI chips it leases back to Anthropic and other labs.
- BMO Capital Markets initiated Broadcom at Outperform with a $455 target, calling it the world's No. 2 AI chip supplier behind Nvidia.
- Anthropic's backers reportedly expect an IPO valuation near $2 trillion, which would match or exceed SpaceX's $1.93 trillion market cap.
Anthropic's infrastructure spending has entered a new phase. The AI lab has agreed to lease $45 billion worth of data center capacity from Nscale, according to PANews, which reported that the deal draws 460 megawatts of power from a West Virginia site tied to a broader $71 billion project Nscale is developing there. The lease lands weeks after Anthropic signed a $19 billion, 20-year agreement with TeraWulf for a Kentucky facility and a separate $9.1 billion lease at a Rockdale, Texas data center campus, underscoring how quickly the company's compute commitments have stacked up over the summer.
None of this is happening in isolation. Watcher.Guru flagged that Anthropic is now expected to match or beat the size of SpaceX's record IPO once it goes public, a claim that lines up with reporting elsewhere on the scale of investor interest building around the company.
Broadcom's Debt-Funded Chip Pipeline
The compute Anthropic is renting has to come from somewhere, and Broadcom is positioning itself as a primary supplier. The chipmaker is in talks to raise more than $60 billion in debt — potentially reaching $100 billion once Blackstone and Apollo Global Management finalize their participation — to fund custom AI chips that get leased to Anthropic rather than sold outright. Under the structure, a special-purpose vehicle issues the debt and investors, not Anthropic, own the hardware. The arrangement builds on an AI XPV partnership Broadcom struck with Blackstone and Apollo in June that raised an initial $35 billion, part of a plan to finance more than 20 gigawatts of AI computing power for labs by 2028 — roughly the output of 20 nuclear plants. BMO Capital Markets initiated coverage of Broadcom on August 21 with an Outperform rating and a $455 price target, more than 25% above where shares traded at the time. Analyst Harsh Kumar, who has covered semiconductors at BMO for more than a decade, told clients Broadcom is now the leading AI supplier in custom ASIC and networking chips, ranking it second globally behind Nvidia.
What the Spending Says About the IPO
Anthropic's annualized revenue run rate has climbed to roughly $65 billion, up from a $47 billion pace in May, and investors reportedly expect that figure to reach $100 billion to $120 billion by year-end, with the company projecting $190 billion to $200 billion in revenue for full-year 2028. Backers are said to expect an opening valuation near $2 trillion once the AI data center buildout race reaches its next phase — a figure that would put Anthropic ahead of SpaceX's current $1.93 trillion market cap and roughly double the company's present private-market valuation of about $1 trillion.
Related: Huawei's Egypt AI Data Center Bid Pushes US to Rally Nvidia, AMD
Financing Risk Is the Real Story
The debt-funded chip-leasing model is what makes this cycle different from prior AI capex waves: Broadcom's investors, not Anthropic's balance sheet, are absorbing the hardware risk, which lets Anthropic scale compute without diluting equity ahead of an IPO. That also means the financing markets underwriting these deals — not just Anthropic's revenue growth — are now a load-bearing part of the AI infrastructure story.
What to Watch Next
Anthropic's reported IPO timeline points to as early as October, which would make the coming weeks the window in which its $65 billion revenue run rate either gets validated by public filings or reset by investor scrutiny. Broadcom's debt round, still in talks with lenders, is the other trigger point worth tracking, since its final size will show how much of Anthropic's compute buildout the market is actually willing to underwrite.
