Broadcom lines up $50B+ private-credit deal for OpenAI chips

Broadcom is working to arrange more than $50 billion in private financing to pay for the custom AI chip it is building with OpenAI, with Apollo Global Management and Blackstone among the lenders in talks, the Wall Street Journal reported. Internally, OpenAI refers to the project as "Nexus," with first- and second-generation parts codenamed Jalapeño and Serrano. The talks are early and the size could still change.

Two other blockbuster borrowings landed on the same beat. Oracle is in talks with Apollo and Goldman Sachs on a framework to buy hardware for a 1-gigawatt data center, under which "private investors would fund an off-balance-sheet entity to buy the chips and lease them back to Oracle," per the WSJ. SpaceX, meanwhile, has engaged lenders on a roughly $40 billion package made up of "$10 billion in bank loans and $30 billion in investment-grade bonds" to buy Nvidia processors, with Apollo again leading and PIMCO among those looking at the deal, Bloomberg reported.

What ties the three deals together is where the money is coming from. AI-related borrowing in U.S. leveraged finance markets has "jumped from about $20 billion in early 2025 to $88 billion in 2026," according to the reporting, and the move from public bonds and cloud leases toward bespoke private debt points to AI capex outrunning what traditional markets can absorb. Private credit, and Apollo in particular, is being pulled into the center of the buildout.

The caveats are heavy. Broadcom's $50 billion facility is targeted to close by year-end but is still in early stages. SpaceX's package is expected to close in 2027 and could end without a deal; its shares slipped about 1% in extended trading after the first reports, while Nvidia rose about 0.5%.

For readers tracking the plumbing of this cycle, this makes 446 AI infrastructure stories we have logged in the last ninety days on our tracker; the center of gravity in the headlines has moved from hyperscaler capex pledges to who is writing the checks.