The companies buying AI chips have started to run out of bond market, and they are asking private lenders to cover the difference. The Wall Street Journal reported on Thursday that Broadcom, Oracle and SpaceX are each negotiating financings to pay for hardware. Every one of those negotiations is still open, and none has produced a signed deal.
Broadcom has spent recent weeks trying to line up more than $50 billion for the custom chip it is building with OpenAI, people familiar with the talks said. Apollo and Blackstone are among the lenders it has approached, people close to the situation told the Journal’s reporters, Anissa Gardizy, Matt Wirz and Justin Baer. The talks are at an early stage and the amount may move. One of the people said the package could cover several gigawatts of chip capacity and is due to close by year end. The chip itself comes out of a partnership the two companies announced a year ago, so the news here is the money, not the silicon.
SpaceX has sounded out lenders over the past few days on a $40 billion financing to buy Nvidia chips, a person familiar with the talks said. The Financial Times reported the SpaceX talks before the Journal did.
Oracle is talking to Apollo and Goldman Sachs about funding a large chip purchase, people familiar with the matter told the Journal, and it is also speaking with other possible partners. Its size is the open question. The Journal says it is unclear how many chips Oracle wants to finance, and offers only a yardstick: Nvidia chips for one gigawatt of data-centre capacity would run to tens of billions of dollars. That describes the scale of the category. It is not a figure for Oracle’s deal. Oracle is aiming to finish this year.
The Oracle structure is the part worth slowing down for. Investors would put money into a separate company, which would buy the chips and then lease them to Oracle over time. In plain terms, the chips would sit on someone else’s balance sheet while Oracle pays rent to use them. Oracle avoids borrowing the money itself, which helps it hold down its own debt costs against rivals with deeper pockets, and the lease payments can start as cloud revenue arrives. The Journal does not say how the arrangement would be treated in Oracle’s accounts.
Behind all three deals sits a change in who pays. Cloud companies like Amazon Web Services and Oracle have historically bought hardware out of their own cash flow. The AI build-out outgrew that, so they sold bonds worth hundreds of billions of dollars, which stretched the public debt market close to capacity. Private credit is the next place to go: firms like Apollo and Blackstone lend money they have raised from investors, directly and in large blocks, with no public bond sale. For anyone who does not follow credit markets, the point is simple. A chip order used to be a line in a company’s budget. It is now something that depends on how much a lender will carry.
A second group of buyers is making the problem bigger. OpenAI and Anthropic have long rented most of their computing from cloud providers, but the Journal reports that they are keen to hold more of it themselves, to lower costs and depend less on other companies. They lack the cash to pay for chips outright, so they need someone else’s balance sheet too.
Because every deal is still talk, the practical test arrives before year end. If Broadcom’s package closes near $50 billion, private credit has shown it can finance a chip order on that scale. If it stalls, every other chip buyer has learned that the ceiling sits lower than the headlines suggest.
Reported by Anissa Gardizy, Matt Wirz and Justin Baer of The Wall Street Journal, published 8 October 2026, with the SpaceX talks first reported by the Financial Times.
