Broadcom posted robust quarterly earnings, backed by continued strong demand for its AI-focused semiconductor offerings that vendor management said it expects to continue through the rest of its current fiscal year, and growth that it said is based on strategic asset planning.

Broadcom reported $19.3 billion in revenues for the first quarter of its fiscal 2026, which was 29% higher than it reported for the same quarter last year and more than 50% higher than what it reported for Q1 of fiscal 2024. The latest growth was on the back of Broadcom’s Semiconductor Solutions business, which posted an out-sized 65% year-over-year revenue growth increase to $12.5 billion in the latest quarter.

Broadcom CEO Hock Tan specifically pointed to strong growth from its core of six customers adopting the vendor’s tensor processing unit (TPU) platform.

“For Google, we continue our trajectory of growth in [2026] with strong demand for the seventh-generation Ironwood TPU. In 2027 and beyond, we expect to see even stronger drip demand from next generations of TPU,” Tan told investors during Broadcom’s latest earnings call. “For Anthropic, we are off to a very good start in 2026 for one-gigawatt of TPU compute, and for [2027] this demand is expected to surge in excess of three-gigawatts of compute.”

That Anthropic start was noted in Broadcom’s last earnings call when the vendor named Anthropic as the previously unnamed customer that had signed a $10 billion custom-chip deal. That deal, which had been rumored to have come from OpenAI, was for Anthropic to purchase Google’s Ironwood TPU, which is being designed and sold by Broadcom.

Tan at that time also noted that Anthropic has placed an additional order valued at $11 billion that is scheduled for delivery this year.

Tan this week also downplayed recent concerns over customer Meta’s custom accelerator roadmap.

“It’s alive and well,” Tan said. “We’re shipping now and in fact for the next-generation XPUs we will scale to multiple-gigawatts in [2027] and beyond.”

Getting ahead of the silicon shortage

That confidence was based on what Tan said was Broadcom’s ability to secure the necessary components, a bold claim in light of current silicon shortages rampaging across the industry.

Tan specifically noted that Broadcom was early in locking up access to low-CTE fiberglass (T-glass), which is a material used in multilayer printed circuit boards and semiconductor substrate laminates. It’s also one of the key choke points in the current silicon shortage challenge.

“We anticipated this sharp, accelerated growth,” Tan proclaimed. “Now, nobody could anticipate that rate of growth it’s showing, but we kind of anticipated a large part of it. … We were early in being able to lock up T-glass, the infamous T-glass you all heard about. We were very early. We've locked up substrates. We have worked on our good partners on the rest of the stuff. … Somewhat anticipation early, and the fact that we have very good partners out there in these key components.”

Broadcom management also noted that the vendor’s work in building custom silicon for its half-dozen customers provided it with a head start on securing what has become difficult supplies to attain.

“We have very deep, strategic, multi-year engagement with them,” Charlie Kawwas, president of Broadcom’s Semiconductor Solutions Group, explained. “They share with us, because of this custom capability, exactly what they anticipate, at least over the next two to three years, sometimes four years. And so, because of that, that's exactly why we went and secured all the elements talked about. And when we secure this, it requires investments with these partners, sometimes developing not just more capacity, but the right technology and capacity for that, so we have to go secure it for multiple years. And we're probably … the first one to secure that up to [2028] or beyond.”

Infrastructure software biz growth slows … but not VMware!

While Broadcom’s semiconductor business showed robust growth, its infrastructure software business was muted. That division, which includes Broadcom’s VMware operations, posted just 1% year-over-year growth during the quarter, an amount that was down significantly from the 19% growth posted during the final fiscal quarter of last year and the 47% growth reported for the first quarter of fiscal 2025.

Despite the slowed growth, Tan touted that VMware-specific revenues increased 13% year-over-year during the most recent quarter, with total bookings during the quarter in excess of $9.2 billion, and the executive also dismissed any notion that AI-type services have impacted this business.

“Let me reinforce that this growth in our infrastructure software business reflects our focus and investments in foundational infrastructure, and our infrastructure software is not disrupted by AI,” Tan said. “In fact, VMware Cloud Foundation, VCF, is the essential software layer in data centers, integrating CPUs, GPUs, storage, and networking into a common, high-performance private cloud environment as the permanent abstraction layer between AI software and physical chips. … VCF cannot be dis-intermediated or replaced.”

Tan added that enterprises will come to rely more on VCF to help “scale complex, generative AI workloads effectively with agility that hardware alone cannot provide. We are confident that the growth in generative and agentic AI will create the need for more VMware, not less.”

Sabina Anja, chief technologist for Broadcom’s VCF division, expressed similar sentiment in a recent interview with SDxCentral, noting that the platform was also a means to help customers make constrained memory and storage budgets go further through software intelligence instead of waiting for or overpaying for new hardware.

“It’s a systems approach of combining the power of software to make the most out of the hardware that you’re given. That way, there’s a shortage – great, how can I squeeze the most out of what I have, which is something that your CFO and your CIO will love as a statement, because that’s what they always want,” Anja said.

Broadcom this week also furthered its VMware push with the launch of its VMware Telco Cloud Platform 9 iteration, aligning that long-standing telecom-focused platform with the vendor’s halo VCF offering. That latest update is touted to include industry-specific capabilities that Broadcom claims will offer estimated cumulative total cost of ownership (TCO) savings of 40% over five years compared to siloed architectures.