Why Broadcom’s Earnings Report Has Wall Street so Upbeat on a Bad Day for Chip Stocks

Dow Jones
Mar 06

Shares of Broadcom climbed on Thursday, as investors looked to the company’s strong earnings report and upbeat outlook for its custom chip business to distract them from a broad selloff in the chip sector as well as in the overall stock market.

Broadcom CEO Hock Tan said during the post-earnings call with analysts late Wednesday there was a “line of sight” into more than $100 billion in revenue from its artificial-intelligence chips in 2027. The company’s custom AI chip ramps with its five major customers are “progressing very well,” Tan said. For the current quarter, Broadcom expects revenue to grow 140% over the previous year, to $10.7 billion.

Tan also announced OpenAI as the chip maker’s sixth custom chip customer and said he expects the AI startup to deploy one gigawatt of the first generation of its custom chip next year. Additionally, Tan said Broadcom has secured capacity for all the necessary chip-making components for this year through 2028. The industry faces shortages across advanced wafers, memory and substrates.

Across its six customers, Broadcom is pointing to about 10 gigawatts of AI chip deployments in 2027. William Blair analyst Sebastien Naji estimated in a Thursday note that each gigawatt could be worth between $20 billion and $25 billion, meaning there’s “significant upside potential” to Broadcom’s initial guidance for $100 billion in revenue, he said.

Jefferies analyst Blayne Curtis also expects that the revenue opportunity for each gigawatt could be in the same price range, “implying potential for AI revenue to actually reach over” $200 billion, he said.

Broadcom’s stock rallied 4.8% on Thursday. The rally came on a day that the PHLX Semiconductor Index sank 1.2% and the S&P 500 index dropped 0.6% amid growing worries thata surge in oil pricesresulting from the Iran conflict would slow the global economy.

The weakness Thursday comes as Broadcom shares, and the chip sector, had already been weighed down this year by worries about the sustainability of hyperscaler spending on AI.

Broadcom shares have lost 5.4% in 2026, while the PHLX Semiconductor Index has gained 8.7% and the S&P 500 has eased 0.9%.

Curtis wrote in a note that while those concerns will probably linger, Broadcom “made a strong case for their AI revenue to outgrow the market and see continued growth” through 2028. He added that it gave him more confidence in the company’s earnings per share reaching between $25 and $30 in 2027, compared with current expectations for EPS of $11 this year.

Broadcom also works with Google on its tensor processing units, which Tan said is seeing strong demand for its seventh-generation Ironwood. And the company’s chip project with Meta Platforms is “alive and well,” Tan said, adding that it is shipping the Meta Training and Inference Accelerator, or MTIA, that is expected to “scale to multiple gigawatts” next year and beyond.

Ahead of the report, there were concerns that Broadcom’s project with AI startup Anthropic would hurt profit margins, given that the orders would be for racks of chips.

However, UBS analyst Timothy Arcuri said in a Thursday note that after speaking with Broadcom, it’s likely “that the mix of what it plans to ship to Anthropic is still evolving” and could include higher-margin networking products, as well as leaning on an original design manufacturing partner for racks.

Aside from chips, the company’s AI networking made up a third of total AI revenue. Tan said he expects that segment to make up 40% of total AI revenue in the current quarter, and said Broadcom is “clearly gaining share in networking.”

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