Deals, deals everywhere. Most of them circular. What could go wrong?

On Tuesday, in the wake of Anthropic’s S-1 filing, The Wall Street Journal detailed Broadcom’s “eleventh-hour” push to cement more than $60 billion in financing commitments for the startup.

Proceeds from the deal, which counts as the largest AI debt financing yet, are earmarked for the purchase of Google TPU’s, which the company’s developing in a joint venture with Broadcom.

It’s not actually Anthropic borrowing the money. Rather, as the official Broadcom press release notes, the loans are made to an SPV (“a shell company,” as the Journal indelicately put it) set up specifically to buy the chips. Anthropic will make lease payments to the SPV. Those cash flows will in turn pay back the borrowed money, the majority of which is bank-arranged senior debt backstopped by Broadcom. Blackstone’s anchoring a riskier tranche of second-lien financing.

It’s with a wry chuckle that I’ll quote from Anthropic’s S-1: “Our revenue is primarily consumption-based, and much of it is not subject to long-term contractual commitments, while our compute and infrastructure commitments generally extend over multiple years.” Maturity mismatch can be a very dangerous thing, something bank executives know better than anyone.

In the Journal‘s piece, Alexander Saeedy, Anissa Gardizy and Matt Wirz walk readers through Broadcom’s weekend sprint to finalize the ~$40 billion in loans that comprise the lion’s share of the financing. Some lenders in the consortium, they said, had become increasingly uncomfortable with the mega-deal in light of deteriorating market sentiment.

In the end, Hock Tan himself had to intercede, calling bank executives personally to reassure them on Broadcom’s guarantees, which shield lenders from some losses “in case Anthropic defaults.”

In the same discussions, Tan agreed to higher rates on the SPV loans, the Journal said, adding that Broadcom’s several hats — Tan’s supplying the chips, backstopping the loans and facilitating the financing discussions — speak both to how “interlinked” the AI buildout’s becoming and to how high the stakes now are “for all involved.”

That’s an understatement. The stakes are more than “high.” This whole thing amounts to a web of promises spun up on assumptions about enterprise-level AI adoption and consumers’ willingness to pay for AI-related services.

The TMT vendor financing analogue may be apt, but if you ask me, the better (and far scarier) parallel is the rehypothecated collateral daisy chain that acted as the force leverage multiplier in the lead-up to the GFC.

On Tuesday, Meta detailed plans to raise nearly $98 billion in new equity across an upsized $25 billion common sale, $12.5 billion in convertible preferred and $60 billion from an ATM program for the newly-created non-voting shares.

Guess who’s buying? Jensen Huang, for one. “Nvidia and Meta are expanding our partnership… so Muse can empower billions of people to achieve more and pursue greater ambitions,” he said, announcing a $3 billion commitment to Meta’s equity raise.

Also among those ready and excited to participate: AMD and, coming full circle, Broadcom, who’ll apparently buy $2 billion between them. Meta’s press release named the two companies, along with Nvidia, as cornerstone investors in cumulatively for $5 billion.