Broadcom (NASDAQ: AVGO) became the eighth U.S. company to surpass $1 trillion in market capitalization, thanks to a 24% rise in its stock price on Friday.

The stock has increased 107.11% since the beginning of the year.

The rise follows the company’s prediction of a “huge” opportunity in sales of artificial intelligence (AI) chips and its latest quarterly earnings report that showed AI-related revenue rose 220%. It became.

Broad who?

Broadcom is a global semiconductor and infrastructure software company that designs and manufactures custom chips for data centers, smartphones, networking, and consumer electronics. The company also manufactures semiconductors used in electric vehicles and broadband communications.

The company has a long-standing relationship with Apple, supplying components for the iPhone, including wireless connectivity chips.

In addition to its hardware business, Broadcom has expanded into enterprise software by acquiring CA Technologies, Symantec’s enterprise security division, and, most notably, VMware in a $69 billion deal.

Broadcom underwent a major transformation after its failed attempt to buy Qualcomm for $120 billion in 2018 was blocked by the Trump administration, citing national security concerns. In response to that setback, Broadcom diversified away from its reliance on semiconductors.

revenue

Broadcom reported fourth-quarter revenue of $14.05 billion, an increase of 51% year-over-year. Net income increased 23% to US$4.32 billion from US$3.52 billion in the same period last year.

Adjusted earnings per share (EPS) for the quarter came to $1.42, beating analysts’ expectations of $1.39.

Broadcom’s move to infrastructure software has paid off. Quarterly revenue from infrastructure software revenue reached $5.82 billion, an increase of 181% year-over-year. The sector’s annual revenue jumped from $7.6 billion in 2023 to $21.5 billion in 2024, accounting for 41% of total revenue.

VMware’s integration is progressing “ahead of schedule” and operating margins are 70%, according to CEO Hock Tan. VMware’s quarterly costs halved from $2.4 billion to $1.2 billion.

Quarterly sales for the company’s semiconductor division, which includes AI chips, rose 12% to $8.23 billion. However, quarterly sales of non-AI semiconductors fell 23% to US$4.5 billion, reflecting the overall industry slowdown.

The company’s annual AI chip revenue reached US$12.2 billion, an increase of 220% driven by demand from “hyperscale” customers.

Tan revealed that Broadcom expects these customers (widely believed to include Alphabet, Meta, and ByteDance) to each deploy 1 million AI XPU clusters by 2027. I made it.

Tan estimated that Broadcom’s “serviceable market” for AI XPUs and related networking equipment could reach between US$60 billion and US$90 billion by fiscal 2027. He also noted that the company has added two new hyperscale customers, presumably OpenAI and Apple. .

Analyst reaction

Analysts at Bank of America reiterated their rating on Broadcom as a “buy” and raised their price target to $250 from $195. They cited Broadcom’s “explosion of AI opportunities” and noted that the company dominates the market for custom chips used for internal workloads at large tech companies.

Bernstein analyst Stacey Rasgon raised Broadcom’s price target to $250 from $195, but quipped that CEO Hock Tan “might look good in a leather jacket” and said Nvidia CEO paid homage to Jensen Huang’s iconic look. Morgan Stanley analysts said the company remains “one of the most attractive ways to take on AI cicadas” over the next two to three years.

Not all analysts were bullish. Raymond James analyst Srini Pajuri said the company’s valuation is at 33 times 2025 price-to-earnings ratio, which is a potential constraint on further stock price appreciation, and said this is a potential constraint on further stock price appreciation. maintained its rating.

Market impact

Broadcom’s rise has had ripples throughout the semiconductor industry. The PHLX Semiconductor Stock Index rose 3.4%, but Nvidia and AMD both fell, dropping 2.3% and 2.8%, respectively. Analysts suggested the fund manager may have sold Nvidia to reallocate capital to Broadcom.

Unlike Nvidia, which makes off-the-shelf GPUs, Broadcom’s XPUs are highly customizable, an attractive feature for hyperscale customers looking for higher efficiency. Mizuho analysts suggested that custom silicon, such as Broadcom’s XPUs, will gradually gain market share from GPUs, especially in AI inference tasks.

Looking to the future

Broadcom expects revenue of $14.6 billion in the first quarter of fiscal 2025, up 22% year over year. AI sales are expected to increase 65% to $3.8 billion, while non-AI semiconductor sales are expected to decline by a “mid-tenth” to about $4.3 billion.

The company’s new product roadmap includes next-generation XPUs built on a 3nm process scheduled to debut in late 2025. Broadcom believes that the company will be the first to launch 3nm XPU products and can gain an advantage in the AI ​​computing market.

More generally, data from International Business Strategies (IBS) shows that the AI ​​chip market is expected to grow 74% in 2025, far outpacing the broader semiconductor market’s forecast of 12%. The demand for computing power from large-scale language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT has led Big Tech companies to increase spending. Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, and Microsoft’s total capital spending increased 18% last quarter to $58.9 billion.