On October 1 Anthropic’s IPO filing showed that Broadcom had agreed to lend it up to $42 billion to finance infrastructure spending. Asked about the deal, Robert Leitão, managing partner of Rothschild & Co, said: “It feels that there’s quite a concentrated bet right now on two companies being able to generate enough revenues to support all the financing that’s happened.”
The convertible facility finances roughly a third of a $125.2 billion five-year computing lease disclosed in the filing. Blackstone, Bank of America, Citigroup and Morgan Stanley are among the lenders named in the syndicate, however Rothschild was not among them. Rothschild is not writing the loan, which is why its head of advisory can describe the financing as a concentrated bet.
Just a day earlier, Rothschild & Co Global Advisory was named Financial Adviser of the Year. The award recognises the firm’s independent advisory work, not its role in lending.
Rothschild’s independent advisory record
Rothschild completed 351 M&A transactions in 2024, according to Dealogic, 43% more than its closest independent competitor, Lazard. It was subsequently named the world’s best bank for independent advisory in 2025.
Global Advisory has around 1,600 industry and financing specialists in 47 countries, inside a group of about 4,600 people. The group has been family-controlled and private since the Rothschild holding company Concordia launched a €3.7 billion offer to take it back into private hands in 2023.
Among the deals cited in the 2025 citation were the €4.3 billion sale of Budapest Airport to the Hungarian state and VINCI Airports, and a 41st transaction for CVC.
The Budapest Airport transaction closed in June 2024. The Hungarian state, through Corvinus, took an 80% stake and VINCI Airports took 20% and became the operator. The sellers were AviAlliance (a subsidiary of PSP Investments), Singapore’s GIC and Canada’s CDPQ. The equity value was €3.1 billion, with roughly €1.2 billion of net debt rolled over, for a total of €4.3 billion. Euromoney described it as the first 100% sale of a major European capital city airport since the pandemic. Rothschild advised on the sale.
The CVC figure covers a long relationship. In the same period Rothschild acted as lead adviser on CVC’s €2.3 billion IPO in Amsterdam. Completing a 41st transaction for the same sponsor is the ordinary measure of whether an independent adviser remains useful to a financial sponsor that allocates capital repeatedly.
This year the firm has continued to build its advisory business. In May it hired Lucy Baldwin as Global Head of Equities. A day earlier it had expanded its Investor Advisory business and appointed Matt Hall as managing director of the renamed Global Investor Advisory platform. Both moves take the firm further into capital markets advice alongside M&A.
Who is Robert Leitão?
Leitão is Head of Global Advisory, co-chairman of the Group Partners Committee and chief executive of NM Rothschild & Sons, the UK subsidiary. He joined in 1998 from Morgan Grenfell, where he was head of UK M&A. He trained as an engineer at Imperial College before qualifying as a chartered accountant at Peat Marwick Mitchell, now KPMG.
Rothschild has no single global head of M&A. Leitão heads the division that runs its M&A business. He is also an independent director and chairman of the audit committee of Manchester United plc.
On the Baldwin appointment he said: “Lucy is a highly respected markets leader with deep experience across equities, investor engagement and global platforms.”
Deal count and AI financing
Rothschild leads on deal count, not deal value. As of 2022 it ranked among the leading global M&A advisers by number of deals but tenth worldwide by value, behind mostly American banks. Its strength is the mid-market and Europe, which is why the 351-deal figure and the Lazard comparison are the numbers it leads with.
The firm is expanding its equities and capital markets advice at the same time as its head of advisory has described the financing behind the AI boom as concentrated.
If AI-linked financing later comes under strain, boards that want advice from firms that are not also lenders will have independent advisers to call upon. Rothschild’s equities expansion sits alongside that ambition. For now, Rothschild has not said whether the expansion is a bet on the IPO pipeline, including the AI listings now in registration.
Author: Tejas Bansal
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