Three of the biggest buyers of AI compute are lining up private loans to pay for chips, a sign the buildout has grown too expensive for company cash and ordinary bond sales to cover. Broadcom has been working in recent weeks to arrange more than $50 billion in financing for the custom AI chip it is developing with OpenAI, the Wall Street Journal reported, with Apollo Global Management and Blackstone among the lenders approached. The package could cover several gigawatts of computing capacity and close before year end, following the partnership the two companies announced a year earlier to develop 10 gigawatts of custom chips from the second half of 2026 through 2029.
Oracle is in discussions with Apollo and Goldman Sachs about funding a large chip purchase through an off-balance-sheet special purpose vehicle, the Journal reported, a structure that keeps the debt off Oracle’s main financial statements and bridges the gap between paying for hardware now and collecting cloud revenue later. No dollar figure has been disclosed for Oracle’s arrangement. SpaceX has spoken with lenders about roughly $40 billion in financing tied to Nvidia chips, the Financial Times reported, structured as about $10 billion in bank loans plus $30 billion in investment-grade debt, with Apollo expected to lead and a 2027 closing.
Context matters. Adding Broadcom’s initial $35 billion transaction completed in June and the $60 billion Anthropic package now syndicating, the three newly reported deals bring the AI chip financing arranged in about a week to roughly $150 billion, per industry tallies. In August, Nvidia launched an independent financing platform with Apollo, BlackRock, Blackstone, Brookfield, Goldman Sachs and KKR aimed at mobilizing more than $500 billion in third-party capital, explicitly to turn AI compute into an investable asset class. The pattern is consistent: compute is being financialized, and the buyers are reaching past public markets for it.