Broadcom reported a relatively optimistic earnings report on Thursday. In the fourth fiscal quarter ending November 2, Broadcom reported sales of $18 billion. Excluding certain items, earnings per share increased to $1.95. Analysts had previously expected the company’s revenue to be $17.5 billion and earnings per share to be $1.87.
At a subsequent conference call, CEO Hock Tan said that the company currently has a backlog of $73 billion worth of artificial intelligence product orders, which will be delivered over the next six quarters. He described this as merely a “minimum”.
Although Tan said the company received a $11 billion order from the artificial intelligence startup Anthropic PBC in the fourth quarter, he warned that the overall profit margin was narrowing due to the sales of artificial intelligence products.
Broadcom has also not provided an annual AI revenue forecast. Tan said this is a “moving target.” “It’s very difficult for me to accurately predict what 2026 will look like,” he said. “So I’d rather not give you any guidance.”
The company said that its sales for the first fiscal quarter ending February 1 were approximately $19.1 billion. Bloomberg data showed that analysts had previously expected an average of $18.5 billion. The company also raised its quarterly dividend by 10% to 65 cents per share.
He said that the $11 billion order signed by Anthropic in the fourth quarter was an addition to the $10 billion order signed in the third quarter. Tan also disclosed that Broadcom had signed another $1 billion customer order, but he did not reveal the identity of the customer.
Broadcom has benefited from the demand for its custom chips in large-scale data center construction, enabling it to capture an increasingly larger share in the industry dominated by NVIDIA.
Tan said that compared with the same period last year, the revenue of artificial intelligence semiconductors will double in the first quarter to reach 8.2 billion US dollars.
Broadcom has been in the spotlight recently, largely due to its partnerships with some major providers of large-scale artificial intelligence models. OpenAI, the developer of ChatGPT, has signed an agreement with Broadcom to use its products in the design of its AI chips. In another deal, Anthropic has agreed to use computing services worth tens of billions of dollars based on Alphabet’s Google Cloud TPU. The components of the latter also rely on Broadcom’s designs, further fueling investors’ enthusiasm for the chipmaker’s AI prospects.
Broadcom’s stock closed at $406.37 in New York earlier, having risen by 75% so far this year.
This company, headquartered in Palo Alto, California, has a wide range of product lines, including communication chips, network components and software.
To gain more benefits from the field of artificial intelligence, Broadcom has been upgrading its network equipment to accelerate the speed of data transmission within and between data centers. As artificial intelligence models become increasingly complex, the ability to connect chips, server racks, and even entire buildings is becoming increasingly important.
