Broadcom Seeks More Than $50 Billion to Finance OpenAI Custom Chips, With Apollo and Blackstone in Early Talks

Broadcom has been seeking more than $50 billion in financing over recent weeks to fund the custom AI chips it is developing jointly with OpenAI, The Wall Street Journal reported Thursday, citing people familiar with the matter. Institutions including Apollo and Blackstone have held talks about participating in the financing, though negotiations remain at an early stage and the size could still change — a caveat that applies to nearly everything in this story.

If completed, the package would rank among the largest debt raises ever assembled for a chip program, and it would cover several gigawatts of OpenAI custom chip capacity, with completion possible as early as the end of this year. Inside OpenAI the effort is known as Project Nexus, and the first two generations of chips carry the codenames Jalapeño and Serrano, according to the Journal's sources. The financing structure matters because Broadcom builds and deploys the systems under multi-year agreements, meaning the chipmaker — not OpenAI — is fronting much of the capital and then recovering it through contracted supply.

The program is anchored by the 10-gigawatt custom chip partnership OpenAI and Broadcom announced previously, with deployment planned to run continuously from the second half of 2026 through the end of 2029. A $50 billion-plus facility against that backlog is, in effect, the chip industry's version of the project-financing wave now sweeping through AI infrastructure: the capital arrives before the revenue does, secured against multi-year take-or-pay style commitments.

The Journal's reporting places Broadcom alongside a broader debtor cohort. Oracle is in talks with Apollo and Goldman Sachs over chip financing of its own, while the Financial Times recently reported that SpaceX is seeking $40 billion to purchase Nvidia chips — roughly $10 billion in bank loans plus $30 billion in investment-grade bonds. Amazon, meanwhile, has explored moving billions of dollars of Grace Blackwell systems into a special-purpose vehicle and leasing them back. Each structure trades balance-sheet capacity for speed, and each premised on the same assumption: that AI compute demand and the prices paid for it hold up long enough to service the debt.

That assumption is where the risk concentrates. The financing chain increasingly loops — chipmakers financing customers who buy chips to serve labs whose own revenue depends on products not yet shipped — echoing the vendor-financing patterns telecom critics pointed to a generation ago. For now, the money is arriving: Apollo, Blackstone, Goldman Sachs and their peers are competing to underwrite it. But the Journal's early-stage caveat is the honest headline. If deals of this size are still being negotiated when sentiment turns, the marginal gigawatt is exactly where the retreat will show first.