Broadcom and MediaTek risk being bypassed after Google reportedly told TSMC it wants to become a major direct customer, per Tech Taiwan. That points to Google's ultimate goal of an Apple-style COT model, though both partners internally still see the shift as a distant threat. x.com  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 

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 

Broadcom's roughly 60% margin looks unsustainable because its custom-chip design role is not irreplaceable. Google's TPU v8i has already succeeded, and it is being handled by MediaTek, whose margin is at best in the 30% range. That undercuts the claim that customers need Broadcom's design capability to compete with Nvidia, especially when Broadcom's margin is not far from Nvidia's own. x.com  x.com  x.com  x.com  x.com  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 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 

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 

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 

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 

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