Broadcom Q1 2023 Earnings Report

Broadcom EPS Results

• Actual EPS: $1.03
• Consensus EPS: $0.94
• Beat/Miss: Beat by +$0.09
• One Year Ago EPS: $0.77

Broadcom Revenue Results

• Actual Revenue: $8.92 billion
• Expected Revenue: $8.90 billion
• Beat/Miss: Beat by +$19.94 million
• YoY Revenue Growth: +15.70%

Broadcom Announcement Details

• Quarter: Q1 2023
• Date: 3/2/2023
• Time: After Market Closes
• Conference Call Date: Thursday, March 2, 2023
• Conference Call Time: 5:00PM ET

Broadcom (NASDAQ:AVGO) (NASDAQ:AVGO) designs, develops and supplies semiconductor and infrastructure software products for businesses, telecommunications providers and other organizations worldwide. Its semiconductor portfolio includes networking and connectivity components, custom application-specific integrated circuits, broadband and wireless communications products, storage adapters, optical components, and industrial solutions.

The company also provides enterprise infrastructure software through businesses including VMware, which offers virtualization and private- and hybrid-cloud solutions; mainframe and enterprise software; and cybersecurity products. These offerings support data centers, cloud computing, telecommunications networks, storage systems, industrial applications and enterprise information technology environments.

Broadcom’s history includes roots in the semiconductor operations of Hewlett-Packard, the formation of Avago Technologies in 2005, and Avago’s acquisition of Broadcom Corporation in 2016. The combined company adopted the Broadcom name and has since expanded its software operations through acquisitions, including CA Technologies, Symantec’s enterprise security business and VMware. Broadcom is led by President and Chief Executive Officer Hock E. Tan and serves customers across North America, Europe, Asia and other international markets.

Broadcom Q1 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Key Takeaways

• Broadcom reported Q1 FY2023 consolidated net revenue of $8.9 billion, up 16% year-over-year, led by a 21% increase in Semiconductor Solutions revenue to $7.1 billion.
• For Q2 FY2023, the company guided to $8.7 billion in consolidated revenue (up 8% year-over-year), with semiconductor revenue growth expected in the high single-digits.
• Broadcom anticipates AI-driven Ethernet switch shipments growing from $200 million in 2022 to over $800 million in 2023 and will launch “Bailey,” its first integrated silicon photonics networking solution to double performance and cut system power.
• The compute offload business achieved over $2 billion in revenue in 2022 and is on track to exceed $3 billion in fiscal 2023, driven by hyperscale customer demand for AI acceleration.
• Broadcom has received regulatory clearances for its VMware acquisition in multiple countries and continues to expect the deal to close within fiscal 2023.

Presentation

[Operator]

Welcome to Broadcom Inc.'s first quarter fiscal year 2023 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.

[Ji Yoo, Head of Investor Relations at Broadcom]

Thank you, operator. Good afternoon, everyone. Joining me on today's call are Hock Tan, President and CEO, Kirsten Spears, 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 first quarter fiscal year 2023. 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 Kirsten will be providing details of our first quarter fiscal year 2023 results, guidance for our second quarter, as well as commentary regarding the business environment. We'll take questions after the end of our prepared comments.

[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 the specific risk factors that could cause our actual results to differ materially from the forward-looking statements made on this call. In addition to US GAAP reporting, Broadcom reports certain financial measures on a non-GAAP basis. A reconciliation between GAAP and non-GAAP measures is included in the tables attached today's press release. Comments made during today's call will primarily refer to our non-GAAP financial results. I'll now turn the call over to Hock.

[Hock Tan, President and CEO at Broadcom]

Thank you, Ji, and thank you everyone for joining us today. In our fiscal Q1 2023 consolidated net revenue was $8.9 billion, up 16% year-on-year. Semiconductor solutions revenue increased 21% year-on-year to $7.1 billion, while as we expected, infrastructure software declined 1% year-on-year to $1.8 billion, even as our core software sustained growth of 5% year-on-year. Stepping back, let me sum up what happened in Q1. From our view, infrastructure spending continued to be up, particularly in service providers, even as hyperscale and enterprise sustained. Spending in technology for infrastructure has been strong, showing double-digit growth for nine consecutive quarters. We continue to be booked for fiscal 2023. Our lead times and visibility on semiconductors remain largely at 50 weeks.

[Hock Tan, President and CEO at Broadcom]

While there have been a small number of requests to push out certain orders, we note that these are the exceptions, and they have not had a material impact on our business. Because we ship linearly throughout the quarter to our customers, inventory on our books has been consistent around 80 days, and the overall inventory of Broadcom products across the ecosystem remains very well managed. We continue, needless to say, to be very disciplined in shipping our backlog only as and when needed by our end customers. With that, let me now provide more color on each of our end markets, starting with networking. Networking revenue was $2.3 billion and was up 20% year-over-year in line with guidance, representing 32% of our semiconductor revenue. We see continued deployment of our advanced Tomahawk switches by hyperscalers in their leaf and spine architectures.

[Hock Tan, President and CEO at Broadcom]

Even as we deliver on increased bandwidth for the hyperscalers, having said that, power remains a major challenge. Just this week, we announced the industry's first integrated silicon photonics networking solution, code-named Bailey, which integrates the active optical interconnects with our next generation Tomahawk 5 switch at 51.2 terabit per second. Bailey doubles switching performance, but it will reduce total system power. Keep in mind that at hyperscalers, a growing portion of our switches are being deployed within their AI networks, which are separate from the traditional x86 CPU scale-out running existing workloads. Now, this is today. Tomorrow, with generative AI using large scale, large language, I should say, models with billions of parameters. We have to run thousands of AI engines in parallel, enabling large and synchronized bursts of data at speeds of 400 and 800 gig.

[Hock Tan, President and CEO at Broadcom]

The networks to support this massive processor density is critical and as important as the AI engines. Such networks have to be lossless, low latency, and be able to scale. As you know, such AI networks are already been deployed at certain hyp erscalers through our Jericho2 switches and Ramon fabric. In fact, in 2022, we estimated our Ethernet switch shipments deployed in AI was over $200 million. With the expected exponential demand from our hyperscale customers, we forecast that this could grow to well over $800 million in 2023. We anticipate this trend will continue to accelerate. Mindful that we need even more higher performance networks in the future, we have been investing in a new generation of this lossless, low latency Ethernet fabric designed specifically to handle such data and compute intensive AI workloads.

[Hock Tan, President and CEO at Broadcom]

Of course, additionally, the exciting growth prospects for generative AI are driving our compute offload accelerated business at hyperscalers. As we have indicated to you last quarter, this business achieved over $2 billion in revenue in 2022. We are on track to exceed $3 billion in revenue in our fiscal 2023. In Q2, looking forward short-term, we expect these tailwinds to drive our networking revenue to grow about another 20% year-over-year. Moving on next to our server storage connectivity revenue. There was a record $1.3 billion, or 18% of semiconductor revenue, and up 57% year-on-year. Once again, as we discussed in preceding quarters, the rapid transition to next generation MegaRAID solutions drove this substantial year-on-year content increase. After four consecutive quarters of such increases, this transition, however, is significantly complete.

[Hock Tan, President and CEO at Broadcom]

We expect then in Q2 on a year-on-year basis, server storage connectivity revenue will moderate towards 20% year-on-year growth. Moving on to broadband. Revenue grew 34% year-on-year to a record $1.2 billion and represented 17% of semiconductor revenue. During this quarter, our broadband business particularly benefited from robust deployments by telcos of 10G PON and cable operators of DOCSIS 3.1. These gateways have high attach rates of Wi-Fi 6 and 6E. In Q2 we expect the secular drivers behind broadband to sustain momentum on a sequential basis. Year-on-year, broadband will grow a solid 10%. Moving on to wireless. Q1 revenue of $2.1 billion represented 29% of semiconductor revenue.

[Hock Tan, President and CEO at Broadcom]

Demand from our North American customer drove wireless revenue up 4% year-over-year, reflecting content increases which we had previously indicated last quarter. Sequentially, wireless was flattish compared to Q4. Seasonally, we expect wireless to be down sequentially in Q2 and down high single-digit % year-over-year. Finally, Q1 industrial resale of $229 million decreased 4% year-over-year as softness in China offset strength in renewable energy and medical. In Q2, we forecast industrial resales to be down low single-digit % year-over-year on continuing softness in China. In summary, Q1 semiconductor solutions revenue was up 21% year-over-year. In Q2 we expect semiconductor revenue growth of high single-digit % year-over-year. Turning to software.

[Hock Tan, President and CEO at Broadcom]

In Q1, infrastructure software revenue of $1.8 billion declined 1% year-on-year and represented 20% of total revenue. While core software revenue grew 5% year-on-year, the Brocade business declined because of lumpiness in enterprise consumption in this very narrow vertical of SAN storage. For core software, consolidated renewal rates average 119% over expiring contracts. Within our strategic accounts, we average 129%. Within the strategic accounts, annualized bookings of $536 million included $197 million, which represent 37% of cross-selling of our portfolio products to these same core strategic customers. Over 90% of the renewal value represented recurring subscription and maintenance.

[Hock Tan, President and CEO at Broadcom]

By way of comparison, over the last 12 months, consolidated renewal rates averaged 119% over expiring contracts, and in our strategic accounts, we averaged 134%. This, our ARR, the indicator of forward revenue at the end of Q1, was $5.3 billion, which is up 3% from a year ago. In Q2, we expect our infrastructure software segment revenue to be up low to mid single-digit percentage year-on-year as the stable core software growth continues to be partially offset now by weakness in Brocade. In summary, we are guiding consolidated Q2 revenue for the company to be $8.7 billion, up 8% year-on-year. Before Kirsten tells you more about financial performance for the quarter, let me provide a brief update on our pending acquisitions of VMware.

[Hock Tan, President and CEO at Broadcom]

We continue to make progress with our various regulatory filings around the world, having now received legal merger clearance in Brazil, South Africa, and Canada, and foreign investment control clearance in Germany, France, Austria, Denmark, Italy, and New Zealand. As we stated on our last earnings call, we continue to anticipate that the timeline for the review process will be extended in other key regions, especially given the size of this transaction. Having said that, we continue to expect the transaction to close within our fiscal 2023. We believe the combination of Broadcom and VMware is about enabling enterprises to accelerate innovation and expand choice by addressing their most complex technology challenges in this multi-cloud era. We are confident regulators will see this when they conclude their review. Finally, Broadcom recently published its third annual ESG report available on our corporate citizenship website, which discusses the company's ESG initiatives.

[Hock Tan, President and CEO at Broadcom]

As a global technology leader, we recognize Broadcom's responsibility to have a positive impact on our customers, employees, and communities. Through our product and technology innovation and operational excellence, we remain committed to this mission. With that, let me turn the call over to Kirsten.

[Kirsten Spears, CFO and Chief Accounting Officer at Broadcom]

Thank you, Hock. Let me now provide additional detail on our financial performance. Broadcom had another great quarter with robust financials. Consolidated revenue was $8.9 billion for the quarter, up 16% from a year ago. Gross margins were 74% of revenue in the quarter, about 10 basis points higher than we expected. Operating expenses were $1.1 billion, down 1% year-on-year. R&D of $929 million was also down 1% year-on-year, primarily from streamlined project and other variable spending, offset in part by higher people costs resulting from increased headcount as we are hiring. Operating income for the quarter was $5.4 billion and was up 17% from a year ago. Operating margin was 61% of revenue, up approximately 50 basis points year-on-year. Adjusted EBITDA was $5.7 billion or 64% of revenue.

[Kirsten Spears, CFO and Chief Accounting Officer at Broadcom]

This figure excludes $127 million of depreciation. A review of the P&L for our two reportable segments. Revenue for our Semiconductor Solutions segment was $7.1 billion and represented 80% of total revenue in the quarter. This was up 21% year-on-year. As Hock discussed, this came from strength across all of our semiconductor end markets. Gross margins for our Semiconductor Solutions segment were approximately 69%, down approximately 160 basis points year-on-year, driven primarily by product mix within our semiconductor end markets. Operating expenses were $802 million in Q1, down 2% year-on-year. R&D was $716 million in the quarter, down 1% year-on-year. Q1 semiconductor operating margins were 58%. While semiconductor revenue was up 21%, operating profit grew 23% year-on-year.

[Kirsten Spears, CFO and Chief Accounting Officer at Broadcom]

Moving to the P&L for our infrastructure software reportable segment. Revenue for infrastructure software was $1.8 billion, down 1% year-on-year and represented 20% of revenue. Gross margins for infrastructure software were 91% in the quarter, and operating expenses were $346 million in the quarter, down 1% year-over-year. Infrastructure software operating margin was 72% in Q1, and operating profit was stable year-on-year. Moving to cash flow, free cash flow in the quarter was $3.9 billion, representing a 16% increase year over year. Free cash flow represented 44% of revenues in Q1 2023, consistent with what we achieved the same quarter last year. We spent $103 million on capital expenditures. Day sales outstanding were 33 days in the first quarter compared to 30 days in the fourth quarter.

[Kirsten Spears, CFO and Chief Accounting Officer at Broadcom]

We ended the first quarter with inventory of $1.9 billion, down 1% from the end of the prior quarter, or 78 days on hand. Overall, inventory of Broadcom's products across the ecosystem, as Hock indicated, remains well managed. We ended the first quarter with $12.6 billion of cash and $39.3 billion of gross debt, of which $1.1 billion is short term. During the quarter, we repaid $260 million in senior notes that were due on maturity. The weighted average coupon rate and years to maturity of our fixed rate debt is 3.61% and 10.2 years, respectively. Turning to capital allocation. In the quarter, we paid stockholders $1.9 billion of cash dividends.

[Kirsten Spears, CFO and Chief Accounting Officer at Broadcom]

Consistent with our commitment to return excess cash to shareholders, we repurchased $1.2 billion of our common stock and eliminated $333 million of common stock for taxes due on vesting of employee equity, resulting in the repurchase and elimination of approximately 2.7 million AVGO shares. The non-GAAP diluted share count in Q1 was 434 million. As of the end of Q1, $11.8 billion was remaining under the share repurchase authorizations. Excluding the potential impact of any share repurchases, in Q2, we expect the non-GAAP diluted share count to be 438 million. Based on current business trends and conditions, our guidance for the second quarter of fiscal 2023 is for consolidated revenues of $8.7 billion and adjusted EBITDA of approximately 64.5% of projected revenue.

[Kirsten Spears, CFO and Chief Accounting Officer at Broadcom]

In forecasting such profitability, we expect gross margins to be up approximately 150 basis points sequentially on product mix, and R&D spending to be up sequentially on continuing hiring of engineers and seasonal payroll tax step-ups. 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. Please stand by while we compile the Q&A roster. Our first question will come from the line of Harsh Kumar with Piper Sandler. Your line is open.

[Harsh Kumar, Managing Director and Senior Research Analyst at Piper Sandler]

Hey, guys. Congratulations on yet another solid quarter and guide, and thanks for all the color you guys provided. Hock, you mentioned generative models in your commentary. I wanted to understand the difference between what you're doing in AI so far versus maybe what our understanding of generative is. You talked about $200 million in Ethernet related to AI. Is that largely generative? Because we've heard other companies say that for a large part, you know, the generative models are using InfiniBand. You talked about $2 billion in compute offload going to sort of $3 billion. My understanding was that was mostly for video processing. Maybe help us think about how we think of Avago's place or Broadcom's place in the generative process?

[Hock Tan, President and CEO at Broadcom]

Well, yeah, thank you for that question and opportunity to clarify why we highlighted or why I highlighted it very purposefully. You know, in 2022, generative is barely it's just barely starting to kick off. There exists AI networks within the hyperscalers particularly in fairly significant volume. What we're trying to say is very similar to CPUs, traditional CPUs in traditional workloads in those same data centers. You know, we've constrained on performance of those silicon CPUs. On Moore's Law, we're starting to see scale out by positioning rows and rows of servers, CPUs, and networking them together to work closely in parallel.

[Hock Tan, President and CEO at Broadcom]

As we step up to large language models in AI, generative AI in particular coming to play, GPUs are starting to be strung together in 100s, soon to be 1,000s of racks and working in parallel. You know how that goes. Basically, those GPUs work in parallel in a fairly synchronous manner to basically run and do what you call bulk parametric exchange. Basically, you run GPUs together, or AI engines together, whether they're GPUs, AI or TPUs or other AI engines. You run them together. Becomes network. The network becomes now potentially a critical part of this whole AI phenomenon in hardware.

[Hock Tan, President and CEO at Broadcom]

To make it work, you've got to put together many, many racks of AI engines in parallel, very similar to what we have been doing, hyperscalers have been doing on CPUs to make them run faster, high performance as Moore's Law come to an end. Doesn't make any difference here in the form of AI engine. They come from silicon. They face similar constraints. Network becomes a problem, becomes a constraint. Network becomes a very key part of fulfilling generative AI dream here. What we are saying here, what I'm saying here in my comments is last year, 2022, these are more, what you call the AI workloads that are running hyperscale. The advent of generative AI is still relatively fresh and new.

[Hock Tan, President and CEO at Broadcom]

We're doing $200 million, as far as we could estimate, of silicon, Ethernet switches, and fabric that goes into those AI networks as far as we could identify in hyperscalers. With generative AI and the urgency and excitement of it coming in, that we are seeing today, we are seeing that increase very, very dramatically. We're seeing urgency in our hyperscale customers coming to us to secure products, to secure ability to put in place those, very, very low lossless, I would call, very low latency networks that can scale. Ethernet is what makes those networks scale.

[Harsh Kumar, Managing Director and Senior Research Analyst at Piper Sandler]

Understood. Thanks, Hock.

[Operator]

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

[Harlan Sur, Managing Director and Senior Equity Research Analyst at JPMorgan]

Good afternoon. Thanks for taking my question. Hock, you know, as your cloud customers are now aggressively focused on generative AI development and deployment across their data center footprints, right? This is driving strong AI-focused Ethernet switch port demand and demand for your compute offload ASICs like TPU for this year, as you mentioned. From a new product ramp and design win funnel perspective, is this also causing your cloud customers to want to pull forward some of your future programs like Tomahawk 5 or Jericho3 next gen switching and routing products and/or, you know, pulling the design and tape out of their next generation compute offload AI ASIC programs?

[Hock Tan, President and CEO at Broadcom]

Yes, we're seeing all of the foregoing, by the way. That, that happened over the last 90 days. We have seen a lot of that urgency, a lot of that, you might call it excitement. You hit it right on. Yes, which is accounting for the color in my commentary, about both Generative AI-based networks and pushing us to develop a new generation altogether of Ethernet switching that can support this kind of very compute and data intensive workloads. That's one side of it. The other side of it, you're right. We have typically not want to talk much about compute offload, which is another way of saying, yeah, these are very related to some of the engines that certain that are fairly customized, dedicated to certain hyperscalers.

[Harlan Sur, Managing Director and Senior Equity Research Analyst at JPMorgan]

Thank you, Hock.

[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, Managing Director and Senior Equity Research Analyst at Bank of America Securities]

Thank you for taking my question. Hock, I'm just curious to understand just the views about the second half. If I look at the last few years, Broadcom has managed to grow semiconductor sales, right? Anywhere between five to kind of double digit.

[Vivek Arya, Managing Director and Senior Equity Research Analyst at Bank of America Securities]

Second half over half. Just the broader business environment, so it's kind of more of a broader business environment, a question, not guidance per se. What could change that trend for Broadcom, you know, in a positive or negative way this year?

[Hock Tan, President and CEO at Broadcom]

Oh, in a sort of broadly conceptual, not a guidance, as you said, but trend this way, we're kind of getting rather hopeful that it would be a soft landing. There will be moderation as we are indicating this in this Q2 quarter, moderating growth. We see it nonetheless as probably leading to a soft landing of still a year-on-year improvement in the second half.

[Vivek Arya, Managing Director and Senior Equity Research Analyst at Bank of America Securities]

Understood. Thank you.

[Operator]

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

[Stacy Rasgon, Managing Director and Senior Analyst at Bernstein Research]

Hi, guys. Thanks for taking my question. I just wanted to verify and clarify. Did you say that you started hearing urgency from your hyperscale customers around the AI in the last 90 days? If that's true, given that, how do I think about that in the context of lead times that are still 50 weeks? You've got, like, sounds like $1.6 billion in incremental networking growth in year-over-year in 2023 from these AI across both Ethernet and the ASICs.

[Stacy Rasgon, Managing Director and Senior Analyst at Bernstein Research]

I guess, given the lead times, is that more of a second half kind of thing when that contributes to the model, or does it contribute more linearly through the year, or I guess just how do I think about the timing of all this in the wake of the strong demand right now, just given the broader lead times?

[Hock Tan, President and CEO at Broadcom]

Stacy, thank you for your question, very perceptive. As I said, we are not guiding you guys what happens beyond the second quarter, not the second half of this year.

[Stacy Rasgon, Managing Director and Senior Analyst at Bernstein Research]

you did give us some guidance for the year on this, right?

[Hock Tan, President and CEO at Broadcom]

No guidance, sorry. I give you a conceptual trend. How's that?

[Stacy Rasgon, Managing Director and Senior Analyst at Bernstein Research]

Okay.

[Hock Tan, President and CEO at Broadcom]

Having said that, no, we're still working through timing of when our customers need those products in a fairly urgent manner and our ability to obviously want to be very, very helpful to help customers launch aggressively into generative AI. we're in the midst of that.

[Stacy Rasgon, Managing Director and Senior Analyst at Bernstein Research]

Okay. 'Cause, like, the networking implied guide for Q2 has got to be up, like, you know, call it mid-teens sequentially. Is that some of that contributing, or do I get even more, I guess, as we go beyond? Because we're already, once you get through this quarter, we're already through the first half, right? I guess it has to hit in the second half, right?

[Hock Tan, President and CEO at Broadcom]

Stacy, I wish you guys would not do too much analysis. I know that won't happen. I'm only guiding Q2. I'll let you figure out what happens in the second half. I think you're probably better off at it than I am.

[Stacy Rasgon, Managing Director and Senior Analyst at Bernstein Research]

Got it. Okay, thank you so much, Hock.

[Hock Tan, President and CEO at Broadcom]

Thank you.

[Operator]

Thank you. One moment for our next question. That will come from the line of CJ Muse with Evercore ISI. Your line is open.

[CJ Muse, Senior Managing Director at Evercore]

Yeah, good afternoon. Thank you for taking the question. I know that it might be difficult to share too much on the ongoing review from the European Commission, but I was hoping maybe you could speak a little bit about, you know, where they're concerned, i.e., NICs, Fibre Channel, host bus adapters and other storage adapters. You know, do you view these as core businesses within Broadcom? Are they easy to extract out of your portfolio? Is there, you know, IP that is critical for these businesses that are clearly used by your other larger core businesses? You know, anything to kinda help us, you know, understand would be grateful. Thank you.

[Hock Tan, President and CEO at Broadcom]

CJ, I appreciate the fact that you have been definitely reading a lot of those, Reuters and Bloomberg and MLex reports. Appreciate that fact. You equally know that I cannot and will not comment and honor any of this as we are working very positively and progressively with regulators on all the issues related to our clearance. Sorry, I can't comment. Just to let you know, we're making good progress.

[CJ Muse, Senior Managing Director at Evercore]

Thank you.

[Operator]

Thank you. One moment for our next question. That will come from the line of Vijay Rakesh with Mizuho. Your line is open.

[Vijay Rakesh, Managing Director and Senior Semiconductor Analyst at Mizuho Securities]

Yeah. Hi, Hock. Just a quick question on, you talked about generative AI. Just wondering, as you look at the workload, what % of workload would be on generative AI, like exiting calendar 2023 or 2024? Also want to hit on the silicon photonics side. I think you briefly mentioned the silicon photonics cable with integrated switch, the 51.2 terabyte switch. When do you see this ramping, and what's the power advantage on that? Thanks.

[Hock Tan, President and CEO at Broadcom]

Okay. Well, it's, I'm sure I don't need to elaborate on what we all hear about on generative AI, and I think it's still early innings on generative AI, but we obviously are also indicating as we are seeing a very strong and a strong sense of urgency among our customers, especially in the hyperscale environment, to not miss out, not to be late in this trend. And what with generative AI, as I said, with many more, much more billions of parameters that come into the models that they're doing, you're talking about scale out of AI of data centers driving AI engines network together in a manner that we probably have not seen before. It's not a problem that's not solvable.

[Hock Tan, President and CEO at Broadcom]

It is very, very clearly solvable, as evidenced by the fact that we have and deploy, deployed technology to support AI networks even today to certain hyperscalers, where we're talking about at least hundreds, if not thousands of AI engines, AI servers, networked together and working in a synchronous manner. This is about ability to scale out in a fairly sub-substantial manner. That was the color I was providing. It's really about trying to make sure that happens and not be the bottleneck to our ability to get the best system performance, and I emphasize the word system performance of an AI data center.

[Hock Tan, President and CEO at Broadcom]

Where it's coming from right now is frankly, how to network them and how to do those massive, parametric exchange, so to speak, when you run large numbers of engines or machines in parallel as you grind through this huge database, and that we need to do. We're in early innings, and which is why we think we have time to come up to start to work on even a new generation of switches in Ethernet that are specifically designed, dedicated to this kind of workloads, which are very different from the normal workloads that we see today traditionally in data centers. We have to address that. They have to be, as I said, literally lossless, virtually lossless, very low latency, and be able to scale into thousands of engines.

[Hock Tan, President and CEO at Broadcom]

That's the main three criteria we're aware of, and we're driving solutions, silicon solutions that enable that. We have it, but we think we need to improve the performance of what we have to. In anticipation of a trend that we foresee over the next several years. So we're putting a lot of investment in that direction.

[Vijay Rakesh, Managing Director and Senior Semiconductor Analyst at Mizuho Securities]

On the silicon photonics cable, just wondering when the time of ramp and the supported one to be fair. Thanks.

[Hock Tan, President and CEO at Broadcom]

Well, we intend to launch Tomahawk5 early 2024, as we indicated previously. That's a conventional silicon base with pluggable optics switch, top of the rack switch, Tomahawk 5, 51.2 terabit per second. Bailey, which is the fully integrated silicon photonic version, you know, fully integrate the active component element, active elements of those pluggable optics into the switch. We anticipate launching that shortly thereafter. Power-wise, you can see silicon photonics does a lot. Tomahawk 5, compared to what we have today, is 2x the performance of Tomahawk 4. We believe we can do Tomahawk 5 at the same power, close to the same power, if not lower than a Tomahawk 4.

[Vijay Rakesh, Managing Director and Senior Semiconductor Analyst at Mizuho Securities]

Great. Thank you.

[Hock Tan, President and CEO at Broadcom]

Sure.

[Operator]

Thank you. One moment for our next question. That will come from the line of Ross Seymore with Deutsche Bank. Your line is open.

[Ross Seymore, Managing Director and Semiconductor Analyst at Deutsche Bank]

Thanks for letting me ask the question. I wanted to go into the compute offload number that you talked about, Hock, the $2 billion last fiscal year going to $3 billion this year. I know it's a touchy subject and so no customer specifics of course, but generally speaking, can you just talk about the breadth and types of compute offload and how that's changing in the mix from the $2 billion last year to $3 billion this year?

[Hock Tan, President and CEO at Broadcom]

Well, you know, I'd rather not answer that question, Ross. Highly sensitive to some of my very limited customer base. As I said, it includes some of the engines, the compute engines and some of related components that support these engines.

[Ross Seymore, Managing Director and Semiconductor Analyst at Deutsche Bank]

Is the concentration changing? You know, are you broadening customers in that growth?

[Hock Tan, President and CEO at Broadcom]

No, no, very concentrated.

[Ross Seymore, Managing Director and Semiconductor Analyst at Deutsche Bank]

Okay. Thank you.

[Hock Tan, President and CEO at Broadcom]

Thank you.

[Operator]

Thank you. One moment for our next question. That will come from the line of Edward Snyder with Charter Equity. Your line is open.

[Edward Snyder, Managing Director and Co-Founder at Charter Equity Research]

Thank you very much. Good quarter, Hock. So apparently over the last quarter, you were getting out of wireless or getting into wireless or has it guys are gonna be start doing wireless. I wanna get a couple of updates, so maybe you could set the record straight. First of all, even if you see a sea change in, let's say, silicon, mixed silicon baseband providers in the next year or two, does that fundamentally change your opinion of your wireless group? And either way, actually, does it get better or does it get worse? Because obviously, if architectures change, it has a big impact on supply chain.

[Edward Snyder, Managing Director and Co-Founder at Charter Equity Research]

I know historically you've worked very closely with, key players in helping develop, you know, all the other pieces of the puzzle, like transceivers that are required if you're gonna do your own. Maybe you could just kinda reset the bar on what you expect for, without guides, but in general, the wireless division, in the next year or two. Does it, you know, does the atrophy or get greater? Thanks.

[Hock Tan, President and CEO at Broadcom]

Thanks. Good question, Ed. As you know, our wireless group, as you call it, not division, is really not one single product line or one single division. It's not one homogenous group either. It is a few key products that comprises this wireless division, all selling, you're right, you're correct, to a same application and very high-end flagship status handsets, and largely focused on one key customer, our North American, our much beloved North American OEM customer. In that sense, it's one single focus area.

[Hock Tan, President and CEO at Broadcom]

To answer your question, while we're these multiple products, and they tend to keep, you know, progress as each new generation happens, may not be every year, but it happens pretty with fairly regular frequency on a cadence that is pretty predictable after a while, each on its own cadence. It's a very good business for us. To answer your question directly, no. Nothing meaningful has changed. Our relationship, our strategic engagement continues very much the same as it has for the last multiple years, and we see that to continue in a fairly predictable, stable manner.

[Edward Snyder, Managing Director and Co-Founder at Charter Equity Research]

Just to remind, if we could, is, three-year roadmap, I mean, you see stuff pretty far out, right?

[Hock Tan, President and CEO at Broadcom]

Yes.

[Edward Snyder, Managing Director and Co-Founder at Charter Equity Research]

Great. Thank you.

[Hock Tan, President and CEO at Broadcom]

Thank you.

[Operator]

Thank you. One moment for our next question. That will come from the line of Pierre Ferragu with New Street Research. Your line is open.

[Pierre Ferragu, Managing Partner and Head of Global Technology Infrastructure Research at New Street Research]

Hey. Thank you for taking my question. Can you hear me well?

[Hock Tan, President and CEO at Broadcom]

Yes. Yes.

[Pierre Ferragu, Managing Partner and Head of Global Technology Infrastructure Research at New Street Research]

Great. I'm trying to put together a perspective of what's happening at hyperscale clients this year. If I look at your networking division, if you grow like at least $600 million this year in AI, and if your computer offload division grows by $1 billion, that might well represent all your growth in that in networking. That would mean the only thing that is really growing and that is growing a lot this year in that space is AI.

[Pierre Ferragu, Managing Partner and Head of Global Technology Infrastructure Research at New Street Research]

When I look at outside of Broadcom, what we've seen is memory and like the x86 CPU servers are having a very difficult time at the moment, expect to recover in the second half, while like the GPU segment of the market is actually in very, very good shape and growing very well and accelerating again. My question at the end of the day is it fair to say that in these large data centers this year, only AI is growing? Is that a sign of, you know, what the future will be? Do you think that the general purpose part of the infrastructure, like centered around x86 or similar general purpose CPUs, still is a very good growth market?

[Hock Tan, President and CEO at Broadcom]

You know, you pose very interesting and good questions, Pierre. The problem is I do not get. My customers, hyperscale customers, do not necessarily honor me by sharing all those insights that you are and on those questions you are asking. I do not know. I do not know. All I know or what I do know, because I don't sell them CPUs, I don't even sell them GPUs, by the way.

[Hock Tan, President and CEO at Broadcom]

I know what you know out there, which is in certain areas of their business, we're seeing some of these hyperscalers bringing on a sense of urgency and focus and of course, spending to be up to speed, if not to not be left behind as we see the excitement hyped perhaps in pushing applications and put on workloads in generative AI. That's what we see driving a lot of this excitement, all we are saying is we're seeing some of that effect on our networking business with those hyperscalers. That's what it is. Beyond that, we unfortunately, other than the backlog we get in normal in normal networking switches, routers, and key components, we see that. As I indicated in our this last quarter's results, we continue to see sustained strength.

[Hock Tan, President and CEO at Broadcom]

Last quarter and continuing as we indicate this particular quarter, Q2. Beyond that, we don't get to see, we do not want to guide what we're going to see beyond that. Right now, last quarter, this quarter, yeah, see, traditional data centers, scale out in networking, in deployment in networking continues to be strong and sustained in hyperscalers as well, I might indicate in enterprise.

[Pierre Ferragu, Managing Partner and Head of Global Technology Infrastructure Research at New Street Research]

Okay. Right. Just to clarify specifically on what you are doing, is it fair to assume that the majority, a very large majority of your growth this year in networking is going to come from AI, which you have $600 million coming from, AI Ethernet and $1 billion coming from, offload chips, or is that not the right way to think about it? Just for your business, not looking at anything else.

[Hock Tan, President and CEO at Broadcom]

I would not think about it at this point. It might be a bit too premature. Don't forget, generative AI is still early stage.

[Pierre Ferragu, Managing Partner and Head of Global Technology Infrastructure Research at New Street Research]

Yes. Okay. That's very clear. Thanks a lot.

[Hock Tan, President and CEO at Broadcom]

Thank you.

[Operator]

Thank you. We do have time for one final question, and that will come from the line of Karl Ackerman with BNP Paribas. Your line is open.

[Karl Ackerman, Research Analyst at BNP Paribas]

Yes, thank you for taking my question. There were many great questions, quite frankly, on the networking business, which I think is quite significant for you. Maybe if I could, a clarification on that and then a broader question that I wanna address on broadband. On the networking piece, I was curious if you could discuss the growth opportunity in your Tomahawk portfolio now that a peer has elected to stop investing, in their switch division. As it relates to broadband, you know, several companies across the broadband ecosystem have guided a softer outlook due to a buildup of inventory, but quite frankly, that's been on the customer premise side. You obviously have more weighting towards fiber and sell into the infrastructure portion.

[Karl Ackerman, Research Analyst at BNP Paribas]

I was hoping you could discuss how you're thinking about the growth of your fiber business within broadband, both from an infrastructure side and a consumer equipment standpoint, as governments begin to deploy funds for broadband infrastructure. Thank you.

[Hock Tan, President and CEO at Broadcom]

Thank you for that question. Yes, broadband is, to us, a very, very good business and very sustaining. Used to be boring. Boring is good at this point. Last quarter, Q1, as I reported, we actually grew 34% year-on-year. In my view, that's rather exceptional, even though in broadband, we have been seeing year-on-year growth now at least for the past 4, 5 quarters. Still, 34% was rather exceptional. Sure enough, Q2, it normalizes to a more sedate level, but still growing.

[Hock Tan, President and CEO at Broadcom]

The growth in that is simply because we're very well-positioned with respect to next generation PON, 10G PON, which has been deployed in big volumes now by telcos, supported by their governments, countries all over Europe and even on in North America, not to mention other nations beyond that. Basically, it is about reaching these key utility broadband service to every household, and we see a lot of deployment. More vertical market, we also see simultaneous with PON or fiber, as you call it, a large, a strong continued deployment of cable, DOCSIS, so to speak, coaxial to the home.

[Hock Tan, President and CEO at Broadcom]

The cable operators, a few of them, who are on the scale of the telcos and who need to maintain competitiveness as the telcos launch 10 Gigabit PON, that cable has to update DOCSIS to be able to compete and not lose subscribers in the same market they compete against each other. We see strength both in cable, DOCSIS 3.1, as I call it, and potentially next generation, not yet happening, but hopefully within the next couple years, DOCSIS 4.0. Meanwhile, PON is happening, which accounts for the strength we saw last quarter and continuing strength over the last several quarters. Content increases come to not just unit deployment of those gateways and infrastructure, but also the fact that a lot of these deployments come with very high attach rates of Wi-Fi 6 and 6E.

[Hock Tan, President and CEO at Broadcom]

That provides additional boost, content increases, more is what I'll call it, to our revenue growth in broadband. That's quietly still chugging along very nicely for us. All right?

[Operator]

Thank you. As I'm showing no further questions in the queue at this time, I would now like to turn the call back over to Ji Yoo for any closing remarks.

[Ji Yoo, Head of Investor Relations at Broadcom]

Thank you, Cherie. In closing, we would like to highlight that Broadcom will be attending the Morgan Stanley Technology, Media & Telecom Conference on Tuesday, March seventh. Broadcom currently plans to report its earnings for the second quarter of fiscal 23 after close of market on Thursday, June first, 2023. A public webcast of Broadcom's earnings conference call will follow at 2:00 P.M. Pacific Time. 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.

Participants

Executives

• Hock Tan, President and CEO
• Ji Yoo, Head of Investor Relations
• Kirsten Spears, CFO and Chief Accounting Officer

Analysts

• CJ Muse, Senior Managing Director at Evercore
• Edward Snyder, Managing Director and Co-Founder at Charter Equity Research
• Harlan Sur, Managing Director and Senior Equity Research Analyst at JPMorgan
• Harsh Kumar, Managing Director and Senior Research Analyst at Piper Sandler
• Karl Ackerman, Research Analyst at BNP Paribas
• Pierre Ferragu, Managing Partner and Head of Global Technology Infrastructure Research at New Street Research
• Ross Seymore, Managing Director and Semiconductor Analyst at Deutsche Bank
• Stacy Rasgon, Managing Director and Senior Analyst at Bernstein Research
• Vijay Rakesh, Managing Director and Senior Semiconductor Analyst at Mizuho Securities
• Vivek Arya, Managing Director and Senior Equity Research Analyst at Bank of America Securities