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Broadcom's AI chip sales edge past Intel's entire quarterly revenue
Broadcom's AI chip revenue rose 221% to $16.7 billion, 56% of its quarterly total, and it guided next quarter to about $34.8 billion. Strip out AI and the rest of Broadcom grew about 20%, slower than Intel's 25%, so the sharpest contrast in these results sits inside Broadcom itself.
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What happened
- Free cash flow came to $13.7 billion in the quarter, or 46% of revenue.
- Google, Meta, OpenAI and Anthropic are on the customer list behind those forecasts.
- Intel's Data Center and AI segment grew 59% to $6.3 billion, the strongest part of its quarter.
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Why it matters
- exposure Anthropic's expected rise to Broadcom's largest XPU customer by 2027 ties part of the company's forecast to how fast AI labs keep growing their compute budgets.
- constraint Intel must fund its turnaround and a foundry that still loses money from a 41.8% non-GAAP gross margin, while Broadcom keeps about 68% of revenue as non-GAAP operating income after expenses.
- capability Custom XPUs built around one customer's software tend to produce long relationships, and Crypto Briefing links that to Broadcom's willingness to publish AI forecasts two fiscal years out.
Working back from the reported growth rates, Broadcom's AI unit sold about $5.2 billion in the year-earlier quarter, out of total revenue of about $15.9 billion [1][2]. Everything outside AI went from roughly $10.7 billion to $12.9 billion over the year, growth of about 20% [3]. Of the roughly $13.7 billion Broadcom added, about $11.5 billion, or 84%, came from AI chips [4]. The non-AI share of revenue fell from about two-thirds to 44% [12].
The Intel side of the comparison is less tidy. The match-up sets Broadcom's fiscal third quarter beside Intel's second quarter [1][2][14]. Crypto Briefing wrote that Intel's quarter "told a recovery story rather than a boom story" [15]. Intel's segment figures cut against that. Working back the same way, its Data Center and AI unit had about $4.0 billion of revenue a year earlier, out of a total near $12.9 billion [5]. The segment supplied roughly $2.3 billion of Intel's $3.2 billion increase, close to three-quarters of it [6]. The rest of Intel grew about 10% [7]. The reported figures do not separate AI products from the segment's other data-center sales, so how much of Intel's growth comes from AI spending cannot be measured from them [12].
Broadcom's AI forecast doubles each year. The fiscal 2026 target is now $58 billion [8]. The fiscal 2027 figure sits about 98% above it, and fiscal 2028 doubles again [9]. The quarter just reported annualizes to $66.8 billion (four times the latest AI print), while the fiscal 2027 number needs AI sales to average about $28.75 billion a quarter, roughly 1.7 times what Broadcom just booked [10]. The fourth-quarter guide on its own asks for about 18% sequential growth in total revenue [11]. Crypto Briefing's caveat is that the longer-range numbers are "still forecasts, not booked sales" [19].
The numbers fit more than one reading. One is that Broadcom meets its guide and AI keeps taking a larger share of its own revenue. Another starts with the buyers: with more than half of revenue tied to a relatively small group of hyperscalers and AI labs, a slowdown in their spending plans "would show up quickly in the numbers," Crypto Briefing wrote [17]. A third is that Intel's data-center gains turn out to be AI demand by another route [6]. In that case the industry gap is narrower than one company's AI segment set against another's total suggests.
I think the first reading has the better evidence. The widest gap in this record runs inside Broadcom, between its AI unit and its other businesses [3][4]. The counter-thesis is that everything past the fourth quarter is a forecast resting on a few buyers' budgets [19][17]. The view is wrong if Broadcom's AI growth slows toward the pace of its other businesses, since the fiscal 2027 target needs it near 98% [9].
What to watch
- Broadcom's fiscal fourth-quarter print against its guide, and whether AI's share of revenue keeps rising.
- Whether Intel discloses how much of its Data Center and AI segment revenue comes from AI products.