Broadcom has issued $4.5 billion in senior notes as it moves to restructure its debt load, including obligations assumed as part of its acquisition of VMware.

According to a Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filing, the chip giant is refinancing nearer-term debt and pushing repayments further out, with maturities now stretching from 2031 to as far as 2056. Such a move could give Broadcom greater flexibility on repayment timelines, but also lock the company into longer-dated, higher-interest obligations.

Since its 2023 takeover of VMware, Broadcom has sought to double down on extracting shareholder value from its expanded software division. While the rollout of its Cloud Foundation (VCF) platform and subscription-only licensing model has alienated parts of VMware’s historical customer base, VMware has quickly become a core earnings driver.

Broadcom’s end-of-year 2025 financials saw VMware help push Broadcom’s full-year revenues up 24% year-over-year, while infrastructure software, the business segment where VMware sits, jumped 26% in fiscal 2025 to $27 billion.

More than 90% of VMware’s 10,000 largest customers are believed to have signed up to VCF and its related subscription. But while it’s got them on board, the story goes on, with CEO Hock Tan outlining what he described as the “second phase” of its VMware master plan: “First phase is convincing people to convert from perpetual subscriptions [to] purchasing VCF,” Tan told investors late last year.

“Second phase is [to] make that purchase they made on VCF create the value they look for in private cloud, on their premise, on their IT data center. That's what's happening, and that will sustain for quite a while, because on top of that, we will start selling advanced services, security, disaster recovery, even AI running AI workloads. All that is very exciting.”

With this latest debt restructuring plan, then, Broadcom looks to be betting on VMware helping buoy its cash flows not just for the next few years, but for decades. And the vendor shows no signs of slowing its post-acquisition VMware plans either, with a view to bringing the controversial revamped partner program to Europe, Middle East, and Africa (EMEA) regions. having already been unleashed on its Americas, Asia-Pacific, and Japan regions.

Reinforcing its long-term confidence is Broadcom’s increasing foothold in the AI infrastructure space, buoyed by a mysterious $10 billion custom-chip deal later revealed to be Anthropic, along with a less financially defined partnership with OpenAI. There’s also an apparent fifth XPU customer believed to have a $1 billion order, Tan revealed last year, though their identity remains shrouded in secrecy.

Add to that an apparent $73 billion backlog of AI-related orders, and sizable demand for its Tomahawk 6 switch platform, giving Broadcom sufficient visibility and cash flow assurance as it looks to comfortably absorb longer-term debt.