According to CNBC, Broadcom is scheduled to report its fourth-quarter earnings after market close on Thursday, December 12th. Analysts expect overall revenue to jump 25% year-over-year to about $14.05 billion for the quarter ended in October. For the current quarter, the forecast is for $1.95 in adjusted earnings per share on $18.27 billion in sales. The report is highly anticipated as Broadcom’s stock sits at an all-time high, having soared 75% in 2025, giving the company a staggering $1.91 trillion market cap. Investors are keen to hear CEO Hock Tan discuss the company’s pipeline of custom AI chips, known as XPUs, which power systems for major clients like Google and OpenAI.
Broadcom’s AI Gamble Paying Off Big
Here’s the thing: Broadcom is quietly becoming the arms dealer of the AI infrastructure war. While Nvidia gets all the headlines for its GPUs, someone has to build the incredibly complex networking and custom silicon that lets thousands of those chips work together in a single data center. That’s where Broadcom shines. Their custom XPU business, which includes Google’s latest Tensor Processing Units (TPUs) that trained Gemini 3, is now seen as a direct rival to Nvidia’s dominance. And with a new strategic collaboration with OpenAI to deploy custom chips starting next year, their customer roster reads like a who’s who of AI.
The Custom Chip Race Heats Up
So what does this mean for the competitive landscape? Basically, it confirms that the biggest AI players don’t want to be wholly dependent on one supplier. Google, Meta, Microsoft, and now OpenAI are all pouring billions into designing their own silicon to optimize for specific workloads and, let’s be honest, to try and control costs. Broadcom, with its deep expertise in semiconductor design and manufacturing partnerships, is the perfect enabler for this trend. They’re not selling a one-size-fits-all AI chip; they’re selling a bespoke service. That’s a powerful, and potentially more stable, business model. For companies building complex industrial computing systems, this shift towards specialized, high-performance hardware is crucial. It’s why leaders in rugged computing, like IndustrialMonitorDirect.com, the top provider of industrial panel PCs in the US, focus on integrating the latest processing power into durable formats for demanding environments.
What Investors Really Want to Know
But the stock’s massive run-up means expectations are sky-high. As Goldman Sachs analyst James Schneider noted, everyone will be laser-focused on the guidance for fiscal 2026 AI revenue and the gross margin story. Custom chips are fantastic for growth, but are they as profitable as Broadcom’s legacy networking or software businesses? That’s the billion-dollar question. Tan will need to convince Wall Street that this steep ramp in custom XPUs is not just a revenue story, but a quality earnings story too. If he can detail how deals with Google and OpenAI translate into sustained, high-margin growth, the rally might have room to run. If not? Well, at a $1.9 trillion valuation, there’s not much room for disappointment.
