The most important story in AI investing right now is not another Nvidia record. It is the quiet mutiny of Nvidia’s own best customers. Google, Amazon, Meta, OpenAI and Anthropic, the firms buying Nvidia’s chips by the billion, are all now designing their own custom silicon to do the same job for less, and the company cashing in on that rebellion is Broadcom. If you want the least-crowded angle on the AI trade, this is it.
The numbers that matter
Broadcom builds custom AI chips (ASICs) for exactly those giants, and its own forecast is startling: AI semiconductor revenue of roughly $58 billion this fiscal year, about $115 billion in 2027, and around $230 billion by 2028. That is a doubling, then nearly a doubling again. Anthropic is set to become Broadcom’s largest custom-chip customer in 2027, planning to deploy 5 gigawatts of Broadcom-designed TPU chips that year and another 10 in 2028. OpenAI’s first custom chip, codenamed Jalapeno, arrived last quarter and reportedly runs inference at less than half the cost of a comparable GPU. Broadcom’s CEO claims its next-generation part performs comparably to Nvidia’s flagship. And it trades at roughly 25 times forward earnings, cheap for a mega-cap in this frenzy.
Here is the bull case in one line: as AI shifts from training models to running them (inference), the economics favour cheap, specialised chips over Nvidia’s expensive general-purpose ones, and Broadcom sells the picks for that gold rush without being the thing everyone is trying to replace.
The other side
Now the sceptic’s column, because “Nvidia killer” is a phrase that has bankrupted a lot of confident people. Custom ASICs are less flexible than Nvidia’s GPUs, still lean on Nvidia for the hard work of training, and Nvidia’s real grip is its software, which the whole industry is built on and nobody enjoys leaving. Broadcom’s rosy 2028 forecast also assumes the AI capex boom keeps roaring, and if that spending cools, those doubling projections deflate fast. This is a bet on a specific structural shift, not a sure thing.
The takeaway
The useful frame is that you do not have to pick “Nvidia up” or “Nvidia down” to play this. The trend that is actually underway is diversification away from a single supplier, and Broadcom is the clearest listed beneficiary of that trend, at a saner price than the rest of the mega-caps. If you believe the AI buildout continues and inference becomes the bulk of it, the customers building their own chips is the story, and the company arming them is the trade. If you think the capex party ends, none of these numbers survive contact with the hangover. (Not investment advice; do your own research.)