Broadcom Q3 2026 Earnings Call Transcript

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Provided by Quartr
September 2, 2026

Key Takeaways

  • Positive Sentiment: Record results and strong guidance: Q3 revenue reached $29.6 billion, up 86% year over year, while operating margin rose to a record 67.9% and free cash flow reached $13.7 billion. Broadcom expects Q4 revenue of $34.8 billion, up 93% year over year.
  • Positive Sentiment: AI semiconductor momentum accelerated: Q3 AI revenue grew 221% year over year to $16.7 billion, and management projects $21.7 billion in Q4 AI revenue. Broadcom raised its fiscal 2026 AI revenue outlook to approximately $58 billion and forecast roughly $115 billion in fiscal 2027 and $230 billion in fiscal 2028.
  • Positive Sentiment: Expanding custom-accelerator customer base: Broadcom highlighted growing deployments with Google, Anthropic, OpenAI, and Meta, including multi-year TPU and custom XPU programs. Management said demand exceeds its current outlook, although actual deployments depend on data-center readiness.
  • Positive Sentiment: AI networking adoption remains strong: Tomahawk 6 is being deployed by AI hyperscalers, while Tomahawk Ultra is beginning to gain traction in scale-up applications. Broadcom also plans significant capacity expansion for optical components, including EMLs, CW lasers, and VCSELs.
  • Negative Sentiment: Supply and margin risks remain: Land, power, data-center construction, leading-edge wafers, substrates, HBM, and other system components could affect deployment timing. Rising memory content and the increasing mix of XPUs are expected to pressure gross margin, with Q4 guidance at approximately 73%, while future financing arrangements for AI customers will be evaluated case by case.
AI Generated. May Contain Errors.
Earnings Conference Call
Broadcom Q3 2026
00:00 / 00:00

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Operator

Welcome to Broadcom Inc.'s third quarter fiscal year 2026 financial results conference call. At this time, for opening remarks and introductions, I would like to turn the call over to Ji Yoo, Head of Investor Relations of Broadcom Inc. Please go ahead.

Ji Yoo
Ji Yoo
Head of Investor Relations at Broadcom

Thank you, Cherie, and good afternoon, everyone. Joining me on today's call are Hock Tan, President and CEO, Amie Thuener, Chief Financial Officer, and Charlie Kawwas, President, Semiconductor Solutions Group. Broadcom distributed a press release and financial tables after the market closed describing our financial performance for the third quarter fiscal year 2026. If you did not receive a copy, you may obtain the information from the Investor section of Broadcom's website at broadcom.com. This conference call is being webcast live and an audio replay of the call can be accessed for one year through the Investor section of Broadcom's website. During the prepared comments, Hock and Amie will be providing details of our third quarter fiscal year 2026 results, guidance for our fourth quarter of fiscal year 2026, as well as commentary regarding the business environment. We'll take questions after the end of our prepared comments.

Ji Yoo
Ji Yoo
Head of Investor Relations at Broadcom

Please refer to our press release today and our recent filings with the SEC for information on risk factors that could cause our actual results to differ materially from the forward-looking statements made on this call. In addition to U.S. GAAP reporting, Broadcom reports certain financial measures on a non-GAAP basis. A reconciliation between GAAP and non-GAAP measures, to the extent possible, is included in the tables attached to today's press release. Comments made during today's call will primarily refer to our non-GAAP financial results. I will now turn the call over to Hock.

Hock Tan
Hock Tan
President and CEO at Broadcom

Well, thank you, Ji, and thank you everyone here for joining us today. We delivered an exceptional quarter with revenue, operating income and free cash flow all exceeding prior records. Driving this was our Q3 AI semiconductor revenue, which grew 221% year-on-year and up 54% sequentially. This brought our consolidated revenue to $29.6 billion, which was up 86% year-on-year. Operating income grew even faster at 92% year-on-year, with operating margin at a record 68% of revenue, reflecting strong operating leverage. Q3 demand was simply hot and we're just getting started. Our six XPU customers are accelerating the adoption of custom accelerators and AI semiconductor revenue more than tripled year-over-year to $16.7 billion. During the quarter, we delivered Ironwood TPU v7, version 7 in high volume to both Anthropic and Google.

Hock Tan
Hock Tan
President and CEO at Broadcom

At the same time, we began production shipments of the next generation TPU v8i for Google. This new TPU generation has been designed with more memory and bandwidth compared to Ironwood and just like Ironwood, is optimized for inference workloads. In performance it is comparable, if not surpasses the Vera Rubin GPU. Just to reiterate the major technology challenges of developing these complex accelerators, Broadcom is now shipping the TPU v8i ahead of the MediaTek version v8t, which in fact was initiated earlier. In Q3, we also ship Jalapeño, OpenAI's first generation custom accelerator, which outperforms Grace Blackwell GPU for inference workloads. Overall, our XPU shipments for the third quarter were up over 3.5x year-on-year and represented 73% of AI revenue during the quarter. Our AI networking revenue was up over 2.5x year-on-year.

Hock Tan
Hock Tan
President and CEO at Broadcom

This strong momentum continues into Q4. During the quarter, we expect to accelerate shipments of Ironwood to Anthropic. We also expect to ramp up high volume shipments of the TPU v8i to Google. Shipments of Jalapeño for OpenAI will continue, and for Meta, we expect production shipments of their custom MTIA accelerator optimized for inference and recommendation at scale. In Q4, we expect both XPUs and AI networking revenue to triple year-on-year. Together, we expect these deployments to drive our Q4 AI revenue to $21.7 billion, which is up 236% year-on-year. Based on this Q4 guidance, I should say, we expect our fiscal 2026 AI revenue to be $58 billion for the year, up 186% year upon year, and above our prior guidance of $56 million. We are continuing to see exponential growth in demand from our XPU customers.

Hock Tan
Hock Tan
President and CEO at Broadcom

We believe the vast majority of compute demand for AI workloads today originates from this concentrated group who develops state-of-the-art frontier models. We expect their need for compute infrastructure to inflate even more in 2027 and 2028. They are all growing with XPUs to achieve superior performance, cost, and power. Let me now walk you through each of our customer's journey towards using XPUs at scale to run their frontier models worldwide. Our workloads, sorry. Our engagement with Google has never been stronger. This has been recently strengthened by a long-term agreement to develop and supply future generations of TPUs and AI networking. Under this agreement, we're planning to deliver multi-tens of billions of dollars of TPUs annually over the next several years.

Hock Tan
Hock Tan
President and CEO at Broadcom

We expect this growing demand in 2028 and 2029 to be fulfilled through successive generations of the increasingly complex TPUs we are developing today with Google. Our partnership with Google will continue to sustain because we have the strongest IP portfolio in semiconductor design, including industry-leading SerDes, chip-to-chip interconnect, leading-edge HBM and SRAM integration, and simply differentiated advanced packaging. Most of all, we have consistently, I should say, delivered the fastest time to market for TPUs from product definition to production without the need for respins. We believe these are very deep moats for any competitor to cross. Moving on to Anthropic. Starting with the 1 GW of Ironwood we are deploying in 2026, we expect Anthropic to deploy another 5 GW of TPU v8i in 2027.

Hock Tan
Hock Tan
President and CEO at Broadcom

In 2028, we have clear line of sight to deliver an incremental 10 GW, even as we expect Google to grow for us. Anthropic is on track to become our largest XPU customer in 2027 and sustain that in 2028. For OpenAI, Jalapeño is on track for the planned deployment of 1.3 GW in 2027. Together with OpenAI, we are deep in development of the next generation XPU beyond Jalapeño, which is approaching tape-out. In 2028, we have line of sight for OpenAI to deploy over 5 GW of Jalapeño and its successor generation of XPU, which would make OpenAI our second-largest XPU customer. In addition, we are in development with OpenAI on their third generation XPU. As OpenAI announced last week, Jalapeño outperforms the Grace Blackwell Ultra in performance by one latency, throughput, and power, and is actually comparable to Vera Rubin GPUs in running OpenAI workloads.

Hock Tan
Hock Tan
President and CEO at Broadcom

The lesson here is when you co-develop a chip that is optimized for your particular LLM workloads, you will outperform any GPU. Like GPUs, Jalapeño demonstrates that it can also run other frontier models, and you can do all this at half the cost of a GPU. Our partnership with Meta to deliver multiple generations of MTIA XPUs remains on track. Between now and the end of 2027, we will be delivering three generations of MTIA accelerators to Meta. Across these three generations, we have line of sight to deploying 3 GW through 2028. Our content in AI, as you know, goes beyond XPUs. We are the leader in AI networking, and we continue to extend our lead.

Hock Tan
Hock Tan
President and CEO at Broadcom

In Ethernet switching for scale up and scale out, we were first to market with our 100 Tb Tomahawk 6, and we just picked up Tomahawk 7, the industry's first 200 Tbps Ethernet switch. For scaling in, we continue to be the leader in every generation of PCI Express switching. We are now the leader in leading-edge optical DSPs and are rapidly expanding our capacity and market position as a leader in EMLs, VCSELs, and CW lasers for optical interconnects. In sum, we continue to invest, and invest heavily, to provide the broadest and most leading-edge AI portfolio. In fact, our AI networking revenue is expected to grow just as fast as XPUs over the next few years. Reflecting our excellent progress with this key group of LLM customers, here is our outlook for our AI semiconductor revenue.

Hock Tan
Hock Tan
President and CEO at Broadcom

In 2027, we have secured the supply to again double AI revenue to approximately $115 billion. Our demand actually exceeds this outlook, and we will work to improve supply. In 2028, we expect the trajectory of growth to continue. We have line of sight for fiscal 2028 AI semiconductor revenue growth to again double to $230 billion. Here again, we have secured the supply to meet this outlook. This AI revenue guidance through 2028 is being provided to give you the trajectory of our growth. That demand continues to be extremely strong. As a result, I have to say, we are very much on target to exceed $30 in earnings per share in fiscal 2028. Turning to non-AI semiconductors, Q3 revenue of $4.2 billion was up 5% year-on-year and flat sequentially. Broadband and server storage together were up, partially offset by a decline in wireless.

Hock Tan
Hock Tan
President and CEO at Broadcom

In Q4, we forecast non-AI semiconductor revenue to be approximately $4.3 billion, again up 5% sequentially. Talking about infrastructure software, Q3 revenue of $8.8 billion was up 29% year-on-year and we sustained ARR growth of 15% year-on-year. For Q4, we forecast infrastructure software revenue to stabilize at approximately $8.7 billion. We announced VMware Private AI Cloud, giving enterprises a secure, cost-effective platform to build and run AI alongside their existing applications. It brings together AI infrastructure, security, and compliance, and the tools to build and operate trusted AI agents, all while protecting enterprise data. VCF, VMware Cloud that is also making it easier for customers to repatriate workloads from public cloud to private cloud, where they can gain greater control and significantly improve infrastructure economics. Enterprise consumption of AI is in fact opening a new opportunity for our infrastructure software business.

Hock Tan
Hock Tan
President and CEO at Broadcom

To sum it all, for Q4 2026, we expect consolidated revenue to grow to $34.8 billion, up 93% year-on-year. We expect Q4 AI revenue to be $21.7 billion, up 236% year-on-year, and we expect operating margin to be approximately 66% of revenue. With that, let me turn it over to Amie.

Amie Thuener
Amie Thuener
CFO at Broadcom

Thank you, Hock. Let me now provide additional detail on our Q3 financial performance. Consolidated revenue was a record $29.6 billion for the quarter, up 86% year-on-year. Gross margin was 75% of revenue in the quarter, down 210 basis points sequentially as AI semiconductor revenue was a greater proportion of our total revenue mix. This was better than our guidance of 74%. Q3 operating income was a record $20.1 billion, up 92% from a year ago. Even with the decline in gross margin due to revenue mix, operating margin increased 240 basis points year-over-year to 67.9% because of the phenomenal operating leverage we are achieving. Aligned with this, Q3 non-GAAP EPS of $3.32 was up 96% year-on-year. Now I'll review the P&L for our two segments, starting with semiconductors.

Amie Thuener
Amie Thuener
CFO at Broadcom

Revenue for our Semiconductor Solutions segment was a record $20.8 billion, up 127% year-on-year, and represented 70% of our total revenue. AI semiconductor revenue of $16.7 billion represented 56% of total revenue, up from 49% in Q2. Gross margin for our Semiconductor Solutions segment was approximately 76%. Operating expenses of $1.2 billion reflected investments in R&D, with OpEx representing 6% of segment revenue. Operating margin of 61% was up 440 basis points year-on-year as revenue growth of 127% outpaced operating expenses, which grew 22% year-on-year. Moving on to infrastructure software. Revenue of $8.8 billion was up 29% year-on-year and represented 30% of our total revenue. Gross margin for infrastructure software was 94% in the quarter, and operating expenses were over $900 million. Q3 software operating margin was up 650 basis points year-on-year to approximately 84%.

Amie Thuener
Amie Thuener
CFO at Broadcom

Moving on to the balance sheet. We ended the third quarter with $24 billion of cash, compared to $19.6 billion in the prior quarter, up $4.3 billion sequentially. We ended the third quarter with inventory of $4.5 billion to support our strong semiconductor demand. Moving on to cash flow. Free cash flow in the quarter was a record $13.7 billion and represented 46% of revenue. We spent $532 million on capital expenditures in the quarter. Turning to capital allocation. In Q3, we paid stockholders $3.1 billion of cash dividends based on a quarterly common stock dividend of $0.65 per share. In Q3, we also paid down $5.6 billion of long-term debt. Subsequent to quarter end, we paid down an additional $1.5 billion of senior notes upon maturity.

Amie Thuener
Amie Thuener
CFO at Broadcom

The weighted average coupon rate and years to maturity of our gross principal fixed rate debt of $59.6 billion is 4% and 7.4 years, respectively. In June, we established the AI XPV Platform in partnership with Apollo and Blackstone to enable more than 20 GW of compute infrastructure for OpenAI and Anthropic by the end of 2028. We closed the first $35 billion tranche in June for Anthropic's 1 GW deployment, which is already underway. While future tranches will include unique features tailored to specific lab and investor needs, our core strategy remains consistent. First, we are empowering two of our most strategic customers, the leading AI labs, to bridge the gap between their current cash flow and the significant upfront investments required for their businesses. Our XPUs enable cost-effective, sustainable growth at multiples of their infrastructure costs.

Amie Thuener
Amie Thuener
CFO at Broadcom

Second, this XPV Platform enables highly investable customers and facilitates execution where demand is already locked in. Third, we review any strategic financings through a commercial as well as balance sheet lens, consistent with our existing capital allocation framework. Through the XPV Platform, we partner with sophisticated third-party financial partners to independently underwrite and capitalize the assets, rather than providing the direct financing ourselves. Where necessary, we may provide modest residual value guarantees, which are contingent liabilities we view as low risk, supported by the strong profitability trajectory of these labs and the sustaining value of the underlying assets. Moving on to guidance. Our guidance for Q4 is for consolidated revenue of $34.8 billion, up 93% year-on-year. We forecast semiconductor revenue of approximately $26.1 billion, up 136% year-on-year. Within this, we expect Q4 AI semiconductor revenue of $21.7 billion, up over 236% year-on-year.

Amie Thuener
Amie Thuener
CFO at Broadcom

We expect Q4 infrastructure software revenue of approximately $8.7 billion, up 25% year-on-year. Moving on to margins. As the proportion of AI revenue accelerates in Q4, we expect our Q4 consolidated gross margin to be approximately 73%, down from 78% a year ago. As we've discussed previously, this reflects the increasing mix of XPUs with their increasing memory content, which is diluting our consolidated gross margin. Regardless, we expect Q4 operating margin to be approximately 66%, flat from a year ago, because our strong revenue growth drives substantial operating leverage. We expect the non-GAAP tax rate for Q4 and fiscal year 2026 rate to be approximately 16% due to the impact of the global minimum tax and the geographic mix of income compared to that of fiscal year 2025.

Amie Thuener
Amie Thuener
CFO at Broadcom

We expect the Q4 non-GAAP diluted share count to be approximately 4.94 billion shares, excluding the impact of potential share repurchases. In Q4, we expect capital expenditures of $1.4 billion as we invest in capacity for semiconductors. As Hock mentioned in his remarks, we expect AI revenue to double again to approximately $115 billion in fiscal 2027, and double again in fiscal 2028 to $230 billion. This AI revenue guidance is being provided to you to give you the trajectory of our growth, and we do not intend to update it on a quarterly basis. That concludes my prepared remarks. Operator, please open up the call for questions.

Operator

Thank you. As a reminder, to ask a question, you will need to press star one one on your telephone. To withdraw your question, press star one one again. Due to time restraints, we ask that you please limit yourself to one question. One moment while we compile the Q and A roster. That will come from the line of Joseph Moore with Morgan Stanley. Your line is open.

Joseph Moore
Joseph Moore
Analyst at Morgan Stanley

Great. Thank you, and congratulations on the results. You talked about the business doubling next year, and you said demand could be higher than that. Can you talk about the supply around that and what are the supply bottlenecks, and what are the variables that could drive that number higher if you are able to resolve them?

Hock Tan
Hock Tan
President and CEO at Broadcom

Well, Joe, that's a loaded question. Whatever I tell you guys go out and print a bigger number. I think that's funny. We are very careful, and to be honest, we try to be conservative. So we are giving you an outlook. Yeah, demand, we can ship significantly more. Question in our mind sometimes is, even as we ship the chips, are they going to be deployed on a timely basis? That's always very much in our mind when we give you that outlook. But certainly our customers want us to ship more. But we have secured supply, and we think it's the right number to put it to 115. If times, if circumstances change and our ability to scale more supply change, of course we will uplift. But at this point, that's our best outlook.

Hock Tan
Hock Tan
President and CEO at Broadcom

And by the way, the same thinking applies to 2028 when we give you that outlook of $230 billion. This is real demand, we believe, based on what's available, what data center sites, locations are ready 2028 with respect to our customers, the size of what we have, and against the supply chain we have in leading edge wafers, substrates, and HBM memory. This is again, a carefully structured outlook that we believe we can achieve.

Joseph Moore
Joseph Moore
Analyst at Morgan Stanley

Thank you.

Operator

One moment for our next question. That will come from the line of Blayne Curtis with Jefferies. Your line is open.

Blayne Curtis
Blayne Curtis
Analyst at Jefferies

Hey, guys. Thanks for taking my question. I actually want to follow up on Joe's on supply, big key point. Can you just talk about from either a substrate or kind of interposer CoWoS replacement, has any XPUs decided to use your Singapore capacity, and how does that fit into that supply picture you put together?

Hock Tan
Hock Tan
President and CEO at Broadcom

Well, we are going to start deploying our Singapore fab for substrates, by the way, starting fiscal 2027. That would, I guess, address a key part of our supply bottlenecks. Anything else?

Operator

One moment.

Blayne Curtis
Blayne Curtis
Analyst at Jefferies

Maybe you can. Go.

Hock Tan
Hock Tan
President and CEO at Broadcom

Additional question.

Blayne Curtis
Blayne Curtis
Analyst at Jefferies

No, I was going to give another one because I was short on answer. Just one clarification quickly. The Google number you gave, and then you said 10 GW for Anthropic. It is not one number, right? The 10 GW is just for Anthropic?

Hock Tan
Hock Tan
President and CEO at Broadcom

10 GW is just for Anthropic.

Blayne Curtis
Blayne Curtis
Analyst at Jefferies

Thanks, Hock.

Operator

One moment for our next question. That will come from the line of Harlan Sur with JPMorgan. Your line is open.

Harlan Sur
Harlan Sur
Analyst at JPMorgan

Yeah, good afternoon. Thanks for taking my question. Hock, your customers are driving their XPUs, their GPUs higher in performance. The networking bandwidth is also scaling accordingly, right? Your customers are now moving from 100 Gbps per lane to 200 Gbps per lane, from Tomahawk 5 to Tomahawk 6. We have heard that Tomahawk 6 ramp has been the fastest ramp of any of your switching families, and we have also heard that you guys are almost sold out for Tomahawk 6 for next year. I am not sure if you can give us an update on that. It is also good to see the team kicked out its next-gen Tomahawk 7 with 200 Gb SerDes. Out of your six frontier model-based XPU customers, how many of them are using Tomahawk scale-out networking?

Harlan Sur
Harlan Sur
Analyst at JPMorgan

Can you also just give us an update on the adoption of your Tomahawk Ultra scale-up platform as well?

Hock Tan
Hock Tan
President and CEO at Broadcom

Charlie will take this question. He knows everything here.

Charlie Kawwas
Charlie Kawwas
President of Semiconductor Solutions Group at Broadcom

Thank you, Hock. Thanks, Harlan, as well. You are right. Our Tomahawk 6 has been a phenomenal success. It started really first in scale-out, as you mentioned. It is available both in 100 Gb and 200 Gb SerDes. We actually have two versions of Tomahawk 6. Both are very successful and both are deployed in pretty much all of the AI hyperscalers that are building XPUs with us, and even those that are not using our XPUs are using the Tomahawk 6, both 100 Gb and 200 Gb. With respect to Tomahawk Ultra, we have quite innovated ahead of the market here by enabling scale-up using low latency Ethernet. The adoption also on this device has surprised us, and we are starting to see it deployed, starting actually this quarter and in FY 2027 coming up in scale-up applications.

Hock Tan
Hock Tan
President and CEO at Broadcom

Just to amplify what Charlie is saying with Tomahawk Ultra, is that we are enabling now scaling up within cluster of a GPU, XPU in a rack on basically Ethernet for the first time. Because Tomahawk Ultra will perform just as well as anything else that exists prior to that, before being able to do it on Ethernet, particularly with respect to loss and latency.

Harlan Sur
Harlan Sur
Analyst at JPMorgan

Thanks, Charlie. Thanks, Hock.

Operator

One moment for our next question. That will come from the line of Stacy Rasgon with Bernstein. Your line is open.

Stacy Rasgon
Stacy Rasgon
Analyst at Bernstein

Hi, guys. Thanks for taking my question. I just wanted to verify, if I add up the gigawatts for 2027 and 2028, you have one and said, I'm still getting roughly 10 for 2027, about six of which are Anthropic and OpenAI, and roughly 20 for 2028, roughly 15 of which are Anthropic and OpenAI. I just want to make sure that was the case. If it is, if I calculate the revenue per gigawatt, I come out with your revenue guides, I come out somewhere between $11 billion and $12 billion per gigawatt. Your competitor suggested something like 40. I'm just wondering, is this the right level that we should think about for your content, and how should that trend as we go forward, as you said, into more generations of XPUs, again, with higher performance and higher memory? How do those trend?

Stacy Rasgon
Stacy Rasgon
Analyst at Bernstein

So I guess first just the gigawatt count and second the content.

Hock Tan
Hock Tan
President and CEO at Broadcom

Right. Stacy, you're very clever. You put two tricky questions into one. Let me take it. Let me parse it one by one. Yes, you can count the number of gigawatts we are outlining. Not every one, because we're focused on. To be fair, we have six customers. Four of them are just simply going to be huge. We outline, and we walk through with you guys their journey into deploying XPUs. As I said, it's a journey. Google has been doing for the last 10 years. Others, OpenAI, last two, three years. Meta, last three years. Each one is doing it differently, and we like to take you guys through it. But more importantly, what it means in their deployment at XPU for these three years, 2026, 2027, 2028. We lay down. You're right, Stacy, you add up the gigawatts.

Hock Tan
Hock Tan
President and CEO at Broadcom

We are showing where they are headed. What we didn't tell you specifically when we came up to the final number is how many of these gigawatts do actually come up for actual deployment, because deployment doesn't just include getting the chips out there. Before you get the chips out there, you got to get the data center shell in place and ready for literary production. We're talking about fiscal years. What we're saying is, as you add up the gigawatts, we're not saying that over the next two years, 2027, 2028, that there are 30 GW that will go into production, and therefore we ship it. We think we judge it conservatively to be somewhat less, but we see the demand that if they can get it all in place and our products, and we can ship those chips racks in place.

Hock Tan
Hock Tan
President and CEO at Broadcom

It will be 30 GW between the customers we have, the six customers we have. Question is, will all 30 come into production within these two fiscal years? We are giving you a judged number of $115 billion of chips to these guys in fiscal 2027, another $230 billion in 2028, which would add up, I know, to about $350 billion. Another way of saying is, we believe with a pretty high degree of confidence, we will ship $350 billion of AI semiconductors to these customers in the next two years. That's the best way to look at it. It doesn't necessarily mean all 30 GW need to have been deployed within that period. Turning to your more next interesting question. Right.

Hock Tan
Hock Tan
President and CEO at Broadcom

As I said, when you do an XPU, it not only performs as well, if not better, for your particular LLM workloads for each of our customers, it's also half the cost. In fact, less than half the cost. You made my point exactly.

Operator

Thank you. One moment for our next question. That will come from the line of Ben Reitzes with Melius. Your line is open.

Jack Adair
Jack Adair
Analyst at Melius

Hi, this is Jack Adair on for Ben. Thank you for the question. Can you shed a little bit more light on the maximum off-balance sheet risk for the backstop agreements? Your last Q showed that the first tranche had maximum exposure of about $29 billion. Is this about the order of magnitude for each of the Anthropic and OpenAI gigawatts over the next few years? Can you add a little bit more color as well on the residual value and the risk associated? Thank you.

Amie Thuener
Amie Thuener
CFO at Broadcom

Thanks, Jack. Listen, we don't have anything to announce today on residual value guarantees or backstop. There's nothing new to add. The numbers that you outlined around what we've already done remain true. As I mentioned in my prepared remarks, we're going to evaluate any strategic financing really on a deal-by-deal basis. We expect that any that we do in the future, they're going to have unique features, and they're going to be tailored specifically to the lab and to the investor needs. I can't give you an overarching look at what's the max and what each one's going to look like. But we will tell you at the right time. We have nothing to announce today.

Hock Tan
Hock Tan
President and CEO at Broadcom

Next question.

Operator

Thank you. One moment for our next question. That will come from the line of Vivek Arya with Bank of America. Your line is open.

Vivek Arya
Vivek Arya
Analyst at Bank of America

Thanks for taking my question. Amie, I just wanted to clarify any impact on gross margins in 2027 and 2028, given this XPU mix and rise in memory cost. Hock, you mentioned the two frontier labs will be your largest AI customers, even though Google continues to say they are supply constrained, so why aren't they taking more? In many cases, these frontier labs depend on land, power, shelf from their cloud service providers, sometimes NVIDIA-related entities. How much of their use of silicon is truly their choice versus what their CSP or funding partner dictates? I am just curious, what gives you the certainty that they will give Broadcom that specific business in 2027 or 2028 when so much of their funding depends on other cloud service providers who might have a different view when it comes to the choice of silicon in that specific facility?

Hock Tan
Hock Tan
President and CEO at Broadcom

I know. The best way to answer that, a couple of ways I have of answering that and a couple of points. Don't forget, with the rate of growth, these startups, and we are talking about we have six customers, and we are creating these financial vehicles, as Amie described them, for just two of them, not all. The other four customers of ours are financially secure, stable enough to be able to fund it themselves, and we are happy for them to do that and get them up to where they need to with sheer technology, which we have in plentiful supply. With these two guys, Anthropic and OpenAI, it is like thinking of you have two geniuses in the middle of, what? Outer Mongolia, say, and they need to go to college to fulfill where they want to.

Hock Tan
Hock Tan
President and CEO at Broadcom

We do what we can to help them, and part of it is creating sources of financing to help these companies with the leading-edge frontier models in the world be able to play in the same playing field and be able to offer these great technology products to the world. That is simply what we are doing. It is a great investment for us when you think about it, that every gigawatt of compute they deploy, they could achieve $30 billion of ARR, annual revenue per gigawatt. That is a hell of a business model. For us, that is a great investment to focus on doing. To put that simply, that is how we look at this simple thing. It makes economic sense for Broadcom to invest and enable these guys. These guys are going to be hyperscalers in their own right.

Hock Tan
Hock Tan
President and CEO at Broadcom

What they do is they want first-party compute capacity. Just as they want to create silicon that is very cost performance optimized, and they want to run their own data centers eventually first hand. Not even eventually. They want to run it as fast as they can. Short term, you are right. They are using cloud services, third-party services to deploy their models. Long term, we see these guys to be no different from a hyperscaler and will run their own data centers and be first party to offer AI, generative AI, APIs, as SaaS models to the world. We see that happening. It is not speculation, it is actually happening, and we are in the midst of enabling that.

Amie Thuener
Amie Thuener
CFO at Broadcom

I am happy to take your gross margin question. First, I want to just make sure I correct what I said before, just to be super crisp. Gross margin for our Semiconductor Solutions segment was approximately 67% in Q3. To your question, gross margin really reflects revenue mix between both semiconductors and infrastructure software. Then within semiconductors, the product mix is reflected, as well as increasing memory content. As you can see, as XPUs become a larger proportion of our total revenue mix, it impacts our margin. We guide one quarter at a time, so we will tell you each quarter what our margin is going to look like.

Hock Tan
Hock Tan
President and CEO at Broadcom

It is not the first time we have told you guys that, because stop focusing on gross margin is what we are saying. Look at where it matters, operating margin at the end of the day, because the growth in revenue far surpasses their growth in OpEx, operating spending, to support their growth in revenue. We have a lot of accretion, operating leverage, we call it, on operating margin. We expect to be able to sustain operating margin even as mix of products dilutes the gross margin.

Operator

Thank you. One moment for our next question. That will come from the line of Tom O'Malley with Barclays. Your line is open.

Tom O'Malley
Tom O'Malley
Analyst at Barclays

Thanks for taking the question. This one's for Hock and Charlie. You guys talked a bit about the Tomahawk Ultra. You're ramping a variety of ASICs over the next couple of years. How should we think about the attach rate of Tomahawk Ultra to the ASICs that you're developing? I would assume that when a customer goes down the road with you for an ASIC, they would decide to use your networking as well. Maybe some kind of forecast as to how many of those customers are using your Tomahawk Ultra, how many are using Ethernet, just because I assume your penetration with your accelerators is going to lead to a lot of success on the networking side. Any help there would be great. Thank you.

Hock Tan
Hock Tan
President and CEO at Broadcom

Go ahead, Charlie.

Charlie Kawwas
Charlie Kawwas
President of Semiconductor Solutions Group at Broadcom

Okay. Thank you, Hock. On the attach rate for scale up, today we're actually seeing customers who build XPUs with us deploy either Tomahawk 6, they used to deploy Tomahawk 5, now they're going to Tomahawk 6, and some of them are going to Tomahawk Ultra. If you look at where we're seeing XPUs and even GPUs, we're seeing scale-up solutions adopt both Tomahawk 6 and Tomahawk Ultra. The beauty and the reason why they're doing this, as Hock articulated earlier on, it's Ethernet based, which means it's open. Anybody can connect to it, especially with the standards that we have collaborated with the entire industry on. At this point in time, we're seeing it pretty much deployed in both XPU clusters and in some GPU clusters.

Operator

Thank you. One moment for our next question. That will come from the line of Will Stein with Truist Securities. Your line is open.

Will Stein
Will Stein
Analyst at Truist Securities

Great. Thanks for taking my question. Congrats on the good results and the very impressive longer-term outlook you gave. Hock, I hope you can tell us a little bit about the constraints as it relates to land, power, and shell. You mentioned this a little bit earlier, but I wonder to what degree the outlook is sensitized to potential constraints in that area. Thank you.

Hock Tan
Hock Tan
President and CEO at Broadcom

Good question, Will. Of course, we have to be realistic and when we provide our outlook, we not just look at what our end customer, one of those LLM frontier models, just asks of us for compute capacity in the form of chips or in some cases even in form of racks. We are very engaged with each of them on how much LPS, land, power, and systems they have before we actually believe it will happen. Because this part on sites power, shell has a long lead time, the construction project, you correctly indicate that. We do that, and we do that not development, but analysis with our customer, and we reflect that in the forecast outlook we're giving you today.

Will Stein
Will Stein
Analyst at Truist Securities

Thank you.

Operator

Thank you. One moment for our next question, and that will come from the line of Joshua Buchalter with TD Cowen. Your line is open.

Joshua Buchalter
Joshua Buchalter
Analyst at TD Cowen

Hey, guys. Thank you for taking my question. With XPV, I think you have $35 billion of the financing secured. As we think about the 10 GW for Anthropic and the 5 GW for OpenAI in fiscal 2028, are you expecting most or all of this to be financed through the XPV? Can you give us any help on the timeline and hurdles required to secure financing as we look forward to those deployments getting secured? Thank you.

Hock Tan
Hock Tan
President and CEO at Broadcom

Let me start broadly, and Amie will give you specifics. Not every site will be the same because don't forget, next two years, we'll see things happen with Anthropic and OpenAI. It's an open secret, Anthropic is well on its way to an IPO, and with that, its investment credit will change. OpenAI, we still don't have less clarity, but it's different. With that, let me pass it to Amie.

Amie Thuener
Amie Thuener
CFO at Broadcom

I think just to double down on that, I think in every scenario, our partners are going to be looking for financing from lots of different sources. In some cases, we may step in and help out if it makes sense to us and if it's within our framework, and in other cases, we may not. But we're going to look at it case by case and evaluate the specific needs.

Joshua Buchalter
Joshua Buchalter
Analyst at TD Cowen

Thank you both.

Operator

One moment for our next question, and that will come from the line of Jim Schneider with Goldman Sachs. Your line is open.

Jim Schneider
Jim Schneider
Analyst at Goldman Sachs

Thanks for taking my question. I was wondering if you could maybe address some of the other constraints that are impacting your outlook. You mentioned land, power, shell. Do you think that is the largest of the constraints that you face heading into fiscal 2027? Specifically, can you address any other supply chain constraints, whether it be memory, substrates, or other components that could be impacting your outlook, and to what extent you could expect those to get ameliorated? Thank you.

Hock Tan
Hock Tan
President and CEO at Broadcom

Thank you, Jim. That's a hell of a question, and you're right in all counts. It's a multidimensional issue to get an AI data center deployed. We now are all more sensitive about, especially at scale, and we are now delivering at scale to our customers XPU AI data center built upon XPU computing accelerators. Land, power, and shell, as I indicated to a question with Will, is a big concern. More than a big concern, it dictates specific timing of when this capacity gets deployed and be available. But very much in the mix that we have to think about with our customers, and it's a joint collaborative effort, not just one direction, is, you said it correctly, leading-edge silicon. Because for one, to get the chip produced and availability of those chips and the time it comes in.

Hock Tan
Hock Tan
President and CEO at Broadcom

Then even deeper than that, we talk about substrates, which is a specific issue, which is leading us to build our own substrate capacity at scale in our factory in Singapore, jointly with one of our partners. Of course, we all know about memory, HBM memory. Beyond HBM memory, the system memory that goes into AI servers, which we don't supply necessarily, but our customers have to secure too. All these are multidimensional problem coming from various sources, depending on different times, each might become a bottleneck. It's a constant interesting challenge as we work this through, which is why, in some ways, I'm so glad we have only six customers to deal with.

Operator

Thank you. Our next question that will come from the line of Vijay Rakesh with Mizuho. Your line is open.

Vijay Rakesh
Vijay Rakesh
Analyst at Mizuho

Yeah. Hi, thanks, Hock and Amie. Just a quick question. Thanks for giving the visibility on FY 2027 and FY 2028 AI revenues. Just a quick question. As you go through to subsequent generations of XPU, can you talk to how your dollar per gigawatt should improve into the subsequent XPU generations? Also, I saw your CapEx went up. Just wondering if you're adding capacity on the EML, CW indium phosphide side. Thanks.

Hock Tan
Hock Tan
President and CEO at Broadcom

Well, Charlie, you want to take the CapEx issue?

Charlie Kawwas
Charlie Kawwas
President of Semiconductor Solutions Group at Broadcom

Sure. So on the CapEx side, as we've been sharing with you, Hock and I, for several quarters, we continue to invest in our factories. Substrate is what Hock talked about, which was actually going in production shortly. But also our EML, CW and VCSEL factories, our indium phosphide factories, both in the U.S. as well as in Singapore, we're actually more than tripling them year-on-year. So we've already expanded the capacity for this year, and we're increasing it significantly for the next two years, and that's part of what you actually are seeing in CapEx.

Hock Tan
Hock Tan
President and CEO at Broadcom

Yeah. And this one I indicated in my remarks, too, which is demand for lasers, whether it's EML lasers, CW lasers, is far surpassing supply out there in the industry. So we are doing our part to double down actually on capacity and with a fairly substantial share of this market. To us, in our interest, we enable this ecosystem of growth. On your earlier question of gigawatts, dollars per gigawatt, it's very interesting what you're saying. Because keep in mind something that is very interesting, too, which is you're right. With every generation of XPU or GPU, the performance increases. And therefore, and the silicon goes for the leading edge, more expensive to produce. And so ASPs go up per XPU and per GPU. But keep in mind, as they become higher performance, their power increase per chip, per XPU or GPU.

Hock Tan
Hock Tan
President and CEO at Broadcom

Which means there are less of it of a more advanced XPU in 1 GW. So what we are seeing per gigawatt is in the range of less than $30 billion, $20 billion-$30 billion per gigawatt. And we expect that to be very sustaining in that level because the power of each chip goes up. So even as you increase the price of the chip, the content in dollars is relatively stable. Just accept the fact that there's going to be a lot more gigawatts out there. But the dollars per gigawatt will remain in the $20 billion-$30 billion level of our content. But we have seen and we expect to see an acceleration in the number of gigawatts just to address the exponential compute demand required by our customers.

Vijay Rakesh
Vijay Rakesh
Analyst at Mizuho

Got it. Thanks. Very interesting work on that, Charlie. Thank you.

Operator

Thank you. That is all the time we have today for Q and A. I would now like to turn the call back over to Ji Yoo for any closing remarks.

Ji Yoo
Ji Yoo
Head of Investor Relations at Broadcom

Thank you, Cherie. This quarter, Broadcom will be presenting at the Goldman Sachs Communacopia + Technology Conference on Tuesday, September 8th. Broadcom currently plans to report its earnings for the fourth quarter and fiscal year 2026 after close of market on Wednesday, December 9th, 2026. A public webcast of Broadcom's earnings conference call will follow at 2:00 P.M. Pacific. That will conclude our earnings call today. Thank you all for joining. Cherie, you may end the call.

Operator

Thank you all for participating. This concludes today's program. You may now disconnect.

Executives
    • Ji Yoo
      Ji Yoo
      Head of Investor Relations
    • Hock Tan
      Hock Tan
      President and CEO
    • Amie Thuener
      Amie Thuener
      CFO
    • Charlie Kawwas
      Charlie Kawwas
      President of Semiconductor Solutions Group
Analysts
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