Jukan
Semiconductor & AI Infrastructure Research at Citrini
Broadcom and MediaTek would lose per-chip margin if Google, as rumored, moves to a customer-owned tooling model starting with TPU v9. Google would order wafers directly from TSMC, as AWS does with Annapurna, taking control of the chip and supply and demoting Broadcom and MediaTek to IP support and design services. Their revenue would shift from full chip prices to design service fees, which makes Broadcom the bigger worry of the two. x.com
Broadcom and MediaTek risk losing chip ownership and margin as hyperscalers pull custom silicon in-house for platform control and margin. @jukan05 relays a rumor that Google will move to customer-owned tooling from TPU v9, ordering wafers directly from TSMC like AWS's Annapurna and reducing Broadcom and MediaTek to IP and design-service roles at lower per-chip margins. Even if not now, it will happen eventually, because the end state is all about optimization. x.com
Broadcom is depending on a massive Anthropic and OpenAI ramp over the next two years as Google becomes less and less important to it. CEO Hock Tan gave exact gigawatt figures for every customer except Google, which got only a vague tens of billions, a bad sign that MediaTek has taken share. x.com
Google TPU adoption could broaden the AI hardware opportunity beyond Nvidia, with demand reaching custom ASICs, HBM, packaging, optics and testing. Per The Information, OpenAI reportedly plans to buy Google's TPUs and is hiring compiler engineers, but no purchase is confirmed. Broadcom, SK hynix, Samsung, Micron, TSMC, Coherent, Lumentum, FormFactor and Teradyne could benefit. x.com
MediaTek's upside from designing Google's TPU looks limited because inference is the bigger market and the biggest players have their own chips. They will push their own silicon as much as possible and have no incentive to try TPUs; TPU had an edge two years ago, but Google did not act in time. That counters @KairosPraxis's case that the market underestimates MediaTek's TPUv9 ASIC work. x.com
Google's allocation of massive TPU capacity to Anthropic strains its own AI effort while its researchers face compute constraints. CNBC reported internal tension; Anthropic competes with Gemini. Google should keep more TPUs for its own AI and buy more NVIDIA GPUs to rent to cloud customers, serving CUDA developers alongside Gemini. Selling TPU systems changes the equation, but Alphabet does not disclose TPU margins, so NVIDIA-like economics cannot be assumed. x.com
Broadcom's integrated optics, electronics and packaging could lower custom-chip system costs because separate suppliers defend their margins. At similar valuations, it is preferred to Nvidia and has more room to beat expectations. Google TPU v8 shipments are estimated at 4.0M in 2026 and 9.1M in 2027, assuming Broadcom supplies the remainder after MediaTek's allocation. Anthropic financing adds value only if chip profit exceeds likely support payments and capacity costs. x.com x.com
TSMC manufactures chips for most of the leading tech companies while Intel still struggles with its own foundry. It makes NVIDIA's GPUs, Apple's phone chips, AMD's processors and Google's TPUs, plus chips for Amazon, Microsoft and Meta. x.com x.com
TSMC sits at the end of the money trail as agentic AI reprices the chip supply chain, and Google's $40 billion Anthropic deal is the clearest proof. That deal is effectively a prepaid inference contract for 5GW of TPU capacity over five years, and every TPU flows through TSMC, where advanced-node demand runs about 3x supply. Agentic AI burns 10-100x more compute per session than a chatbot. CoWoS packaging is the tighter bottleneck, with prices rising 10-20% a year, double logic wafers. x.com … Show more
Broader adoption of custom AI silicon could benefit Broadcom and Marvell. OpenAI reportedly plans to expand its use of Google's TPUs beyond Nvidia GPUs, and Google TPUs are coming to Oracle Cloud in 2027. Both are potential tailwinds for custom-chip suppliers. x.com
Broadcom's top growth driver, Google TPUs, can be captured elsewhere, such as through Vicor, while its OpenAI exposure through the Jalapeño chip is unwanted in light of today's news, even if that proves a nothingburger. Broadcom should still do great and may be worth re-entering later, but the capital can find better ways to outperform it. x.com x.com