Technology firm Broadcom is launching a new venture to provide gigawatts of AI compute capacity.

Broadcom this week announced the establishment of the AI XPV platform, with Apollo and Blackstone’s Credit & Insurance Business as initial anchor investors.

Full details haven’t been shared, but the platform is designed to enable more than 20GW in compute capacity through 2028. The new venture will rely on Broadcom’s XPUs and networking solutions, developed and customized for “leading frontier AI labs,” including Anthropic and OpenAI.

The XPV platform launches with an initial tranche of $35 billion led by Apollo, in partnership with Blackstone, to facilitate 1GW of compute infrastructure Anthropic is expected to deploy in Fluidstack-based sites, starting in mid-2026.

“We are at a historic inflection point where the demand for AI compute is fundamentally reshaping the global economic landscape,” said Hock Tan, president and CEO, Broadcom. “This strategic Platform with Apollo and Blackstone synchronizes the world’s most sophisticated capital with Broadcom’s advanced technological roadmap to meet this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity by enabling our rapidly scaling customers, starting with Anthropic, to realize their most ambitious AI visions with speed and certainty.”

“The sheer scale of the global AI opportunity requires a bold, collaborative model,” said Jim Zelter, president, Apollo. “Our investment in this platform reflects our conviction in Broadcom’s technology leadership and Anthropic’s frontier roadmap. We are proud to deliver the capital foundation that allows this ecosystem to scale efficiently.”

XPU-TPU

Broadcom has been offering custom XPUs AI accelerators – custom ASIC chips developed in collaboration with major hyperscalers – since 2014. The company has been making Google’s Tensor Processing Units for more than a decade, and has secured the cloud and search company for several more generations of the chip.

Last year Broadcom said it was sitting on a $73 billion backlog of AI-related orders, and had signed five XPU customers.

Beyond Anthropic and Google, Broadcom has signed a deal with OpenAI to co-develop custom AI hardware, and is also working with Meta on its own AI accelerator, known as the MTIA. TikTok owner ByteDance is also reportedly working with Broadcom on a custom AI chip.

Jon Gray, president, Blackstone, added: “The demand for compute has created an unprecedented opportunity to invest at scale across the AI infrastructure ecosystem, including providing financing through our credit and insurance business. We are proud to support this powerful combination of Broadcom’s exceptional technology and Anthropic’s pioneering models.”

Last month, Blackstone and Google announced a new joint venture to create a new US-based cloud platform based on Google's TPUs. Under the joint venture, Blackstone will invest $5 billion in equity capital from its funds, and the two aim to bring 500MW of capacity online in 2027 with plans to expand over time. It is unclear if this venture will be related to previously signed deals involving Anthropic or Fluidstack at all.

Anthropic looks to TPUs and other XPUs

Anthropic, the company behind the Claude LLM, last year signed a 1GW cloud deal with Google to use up to 1 million of Google TPUs. The AI firm then signed multi-gigawatt deals with both Broadcom and Google to use more TPUs.

News that Anthropic might also be talking to Broadcom about developing a custom chip surfaced earlier this year.

Last year also saw Anthropic announce a $50bn partnership with AI cloud firm Fluidstack. Since then, Fluidstack has signed multiple large capacity deals across the US with a number of cryptominer firms pivoting to AI, with many of those deals backed by Google. At least some of those Fluidstack sites will host TPUs set to be used by Anthropic.

Anthropic has previously signed large cloud capacity deals with Akamai, Amazon Web Services – including a massive cluster of the cloud firm’s custom Trainium hardware – and CoreWeave.

The Claude maker is also using large amounts of Nvidia hardware at SpaceX/xAI’s Colossus site in Memphis, Tennessee. The AI firm has also previously been reported as looking at using Microsoft’s custom silicon, and said to be in discussions with UK chip firm Fractile about its AI hardware.

Anthropic, which is preparing to go public, counts the likes of Amazon, Microsoft, Nvidia, and Google as investors.