Chips lift Korea's GDP; $63 billion backs Broadcom chips

Chip exports pushed South Korea’s third-quarter growth well past what its central bank had expected. Across the wider industry, four lenders arranged money for Broadcom chips headed to Anthropic, Applied Materials enlarged its stake in BESI, and Anthropic’s IPO filing named TSMC among its risks.

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Chip exports carry Korea past its forecast

South Korea’s real gross domestic product expanded 1% from the previous quarter in July-September. Preliminary Bank of Korea data released on Tuesday, Oct 27, showed the figure, according to The Korea Times, The Korea Herald and Yonhap. Before rounding, the rate was 0.97%, The Korea Herald reported.

The Korea Herald also said the result was more than triple the 0.3% growth the central bank had projected for the quarter in August.

Exports and investment led by semiconductors did most of the work, The Korea Herald, Yonhap and Reuters reported. Households pulled the other way. Private consumption slipped 0.2% on the quarter, the first fall since the April-June quarter of 2023, The Korea Times reported.

Trade data show the size of the chip surge. South Korea’s semiconductor export value index, with 2020 set at 100, read 733.03 in September 2026, a 268.08% rise from a year before. The KOSPI ended Oct 27 up 3.09% at 5,638.34.

A $63 billion package for Anthropic’s chips

A $63 billion financing structure to pay for AI compute capacity, meaning the processing power that AI models run on, has been set up by Citi, Morgan Stanley, Bank of America and Blackstone. The four arranged it in partnership with Broadcom. The Financial Times reported the announcement, and Reuters, Bloomberg and The Wall Street Journal also covered it.

The money is meant to pay for Broadcom chips for Anthropic, according to Reuters and Bloomberg. That makes the chip supplier a partner in funding the purchases of its own products.

Broadcom’s chief executive got personally involved to seal the Anthropic debt deal, The Wall Street Journal reported.

Applied Materials moves toward a fifth of BESI

US-listed Applied Materials is lifting its BESI stake to about 20%, Reuters and Bloomberg reported. BESI is short for BE Semiconductor. A holding of that size would give Applied Materials roughly one of every five BESI shares.

The market moved fast. BESI’s stock climbed more than 9% on Oct 27 after the stake was reported, according to Reuters.

Anthropic’s filing puts TSMC among its risks

Anthropic’s filing for an initial public offering lists disruptions at TSMC, the contract chipmaker that builds chips other companies design, among the threats to its business, Bloomberg reported.

DigiTimes reported that the document places three things at the heart of the compute risks Anthropic describes: TSMC, HBM memory and leasing compute directly. HBM, short for high-bandwidth memory, is memory stacked in layers and placed beside AI processors. A risk section of this kind lists what could hurt a company’s business; it does not say any of it has happened.

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Information only, not investment advice.