Broadcom's AI chip revenue tripled in a quarter, to $16.7bn
Broadcom sold $16.7bn of AI chips in three months. That is more than the company's entire revenue, from everything, two years ago.
AI semiconductor revenue grew 221% year on year and now makes up 56% of everything Broadcom sells. Total revenue was $29.6bn, up 86%. The guidance is the part worth reading twice: $21.7bn of AI revenue next quarter, then a claimed $115bn across fiscal 2027 and $230bn in 2028. Google, Anthropic and OpenAI are named as customers.
Why this one is different
Most AI revenue figures are a supplier telling you what it hopes to sell. This is a public company reporting what it already sold, audited, to named customers, and more than half its business is now one product line that barely existed three years ago. The projection is the aggressive part: doubling to $115bn and doubling again to $230bn assumes the people buying keep buying at a rate none of them has committed to publicly.
A doubling, then another doubling, on orders nobody has publicly committed to.
How we got here
- 2023AI is a rounding error in Broadcom's accounts, overshadowed by networking and infrastructure software.
- 2024 to 2025Custom accelerator work for hyperscalers turns into a real line of business as the big cloud buyers look for an alternative to buying only from NVIDIA.
- Q3 2026AI passes half of total revenue for the first time, at 56%.
What it does and does not mean
A backlog is not a business, and a projection is not a backlog. Two thirds of the growth story here sits in fiscal 2027 and 2028 numbers that depend on a handful of customers, each of whom could build in house, switch supplier or simply slow down, and none of whom has publicly committed to the volumes implied. What is not a projection is the $16.7bn already banked, and the fact that the customer list for frontier AI silicon is now short enough to name in one sentence.