Broadcom's AI Revenue Soars as Anthropic Becomes Largest Customer for Custom Accelerators

Broadcom has made headlines with its impressive fiscal third-quarter results for 2026, reporting $16.7 billion in AI semiconductor revenue, marking a 221% increase from the previous year. This growth highlights the company's strategic focus on custom application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs), which are tailored to meet specific customer needs, in contrast to Nvidia's general-purpose graphics processing units.

Custom ASICs accounted for 73% of Broadcom's AI revenue in Q3, with major clients including Google, Meta, OpenAI, and Anthropic. Notably, Anthropic is poised to become Broadcom's largest customer for custom AI accelerators, known as XPUs, by 2027, following substantial orders for Google TPU racks.

Broadcom's management has revised its fiscal 2026 AI revenue guidance to approximately $58 billion, anticipating further growth to around $115 billion in 2027 and $230 billion by 2028. This surge is attributed to the increasing demand for multi-gigawatt deployments in data centers.

While Nvidia leads in training large AI models, Broadcom excels in inference at scale, where companies like Google require precise computations for extensive operations. The collaboration with clients like Google has resulted in high switching costs, ensuring a stable revenue stream for Broadcom.