Broadcom (NASDAQ:AVGO) posted AI semiconductor revenue of $16.7 billion in the third quarter of fiscal 2026, surging 221% year over year, and guided fourth-quarter AI revenue to $21.7 billion — a 236% increase — according to the company's earnings call.
CEO Hock Tan outlined a trajectory targeting roughly $115 billion in AI-related revenue for fiscal 2027 and $230 billion by fiscal 2028, figures the company said reframe what an "alternative to Nvidia" means in practice.
The discussion unfolded on a recent episode of the Earn Your Leisure podcast, where co-hosts Troy Millings and Rashaad Bilal disagreed on where the next wave of AI value would accrue. Millings argued that investors misread Broadcom's custom-silicon business by reflexively equating AI with Nvidia, pointing to the company's forward price-to-earnings ratio of 19 — notably cheaper than Nvidia's multiple despite a comparable growth trajectory.
Bilal countered that investors should stick with established leaders, naming the Nasdaq 100 alongside Nvidia (NASDAQ:NVDA), Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing (NYSE:TSM), Micron Technology (NASDAQ:MU), Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL), Alphabet (NASDAQ:GOOG, NASDAQ:GOOGL), and Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT).
Millings also noted that frontier models are increasingly resource-intensive, citing an unconfirmed claim from the podcast that OpenAI's latest release required 100 Vera Rubin chips to power it. The distinction, he argued, lies in the direction: silicon co-designed for a specific workload can deliver a lower cost per token than a general-purpose GPU.
Other semiconductor and infrastructure names drew attention in the same segment. Taiwan Semiconductor reported revenue that rose 53% year over year at a forward P/E of 20, while Dell recorded a record $61 billion in AI orders during its most recent quarter.
