Broadcom is trying to arrange more than $50 billion in private financing to pay for the custom AI chips it is building with OpenAI, The Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday, according to a Stocktwits summary published on Yahoo Finance. The talks are early, and the size of the package could still change.

What Happened

Broadcom has been working in recent weeks to line up the money, with Apollo Global Management and Blackstone among the prospective lenders, according to the report. The goal is to close a deal before the end of the year. The financing would cover several gigawatts of OpenAI chip capacity.

The chips come from a partnership Broadcom and OpenAI announced a year ago to deploy 10 gigawatts of custom accelerators from the second half of 2026 through the end of 2029. OpenAI refers to the effort internally as Nexus, with its first- and second-generation chips code-named Jalapeño and Serrano, according to an investingLive summary of the Journal's report.

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The same report described two other large chip financings. Oracle is in talks with Apollo and Goldman Sachs on a structure in which investors fund a separate company that buys chips and leases them to Oracle. That would let Oracle avoid borrowing directly and keep its debt ratios closer to those of larger cloud rivals, and the company wants to finish the deal this year. SpaceX, meanwhile, is in early talks on about $40 billion of financing tied to Nvidia chips, a deal first reported by the Financial Times and covered by The Primary Wire Tuesday.

In after-hours trading, Broadcom shares slipped 0.2% to $375.70, while Oracle rose 0.3% to $143.96.

Why It Matters

The report shows Broadcom taking on a second role as a financier for its biggest AI customers. The Primary Wire reported Oct. 2 that Broadcom had begun raising a $60 billion debt package, split into senior and junior tranches with Blackstone leading the junior portion, to help Anthropic and others pay for chips and infrastructure. A second package of $50 billion or more for OpenAI would put Broadcom at the center of more than $110 billion in chip financing.

The shift reflects a funding gap. Large cloud providers have paid for data centers mainly from operating cash flow and have sold hundreds of billions of dollars of bonds for AI, but newer buyers such as OpenAI and Anthropic lack the balance sheets to buy hardware outright, according to the investingLive account of the Journal's reporting. Private credit firms are stepping into that gap: Apollo is in talks on both the Broadcom and Oracle deals, and the FT has reported that it is leading the SpaceX package.

Vendor financing also concentrates risk. When a supplier lends money so customers can buy its own products, its sales and its loan book depend on the same buyers. Anthropic's IPO prospectus flagged that kind of conflict when it disclosed Broadcom's financing commitment.

What to Watch

The key questions are whether the OpenAI package firms up before year-end, its final size, which lenders commit and how much of the risk Broadcom keeps on its own balance sheet. For Oracle, watch whether the leasing vehicle closes this year and how rating agencies treat debt that sits outside the company's accounts. Any change in OpenAI's deployment schedule for the Jalapeño and Serrano chips would also affect how much financing is needed.