Nvidia still owns the AI chip conversation, but Broadcom is quietly building a business that makes the question more complicated than it used to be.
Broadcom reported $16.7 billion in AI semiconductor revenue for its fiscal third quarter of 2026, a 221% jump from the same period a year earlier.
The custom chip strategy paying off
The key to understanding Broadcom’s growth is the distinction between what it sells and what Nvidia sells. Nvidia makes powerful general-purpose graphics processing units that can run almost any AI workload out of the box. Broadcom makes custom application-specific integrated circuits, or ASICs, designed from scratch around a specific customer’s exact needs.
Those custom accelerators accounted for 73% of Broadcom’s Q3 AI revenue, and the client list reads like a who’s who of frontier AI development. Google has partnered with Broadcom across multiple generations of its Tensor Processing Units. Meta’s MTIA chip family runs through the same pipeline. OpenAI is developing its so-called Jalapeño chips with Broadcom’s help, and Anthropic has joined the roster as well.
