Prime Highlights:
- Broadcom reveals that Anthropic is the customer behind a $10 billion order for custom chips.
- Anthropic placed an additional $11 billion order, reflecting strong demand for Broadcom’s solutions.
Key Facts:
- Broadcom is delivering entire server racks of Google TPUs to Anthropic.
- Broadcom secured a fifth customer with a $1 billion order, signaling growing interest in its custom chips.
Background:
Broadcom has confirmed that AI lab Anthropic is the customer behind a previously undisclosed $10 billion order for custom chips, the company announced during its fourth-quarter earnings call. CEO Hock Tan also revealed that Anthropic placed an additional $11 billion order in the latest quarter.
The orders involve Google’s latest tensor processing units (TPUs), which Broadcom helps manufacture. Rather than providing chips alone, Broadcom is delivering entire server racks to Anthropic, marking the company’s fourth customer for its custom AI chips, called XPUs.
This move follows a wider partnership between Anthropic and Google, giving the company access to up to 1 million TPUs and greatly increasing its computing capacity in 2026. Anthropic uses multiple cloud providers and different types of chips, including Google TPUs, Amazon Trainium chips, and Nvidia GPUs, choosing whichever works best for their workloads.
Experts say Google’s TPUs, which are custom-designed chips, can be more efficient for certain tasks than Nvidia’s leading GPUs. Broadcom’s growing customer base, including a recently secured fifth customer with a $1 billion order, shows rising demand for its chip solutions.
Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian said Anthropic’s expanding use of TPUs reflects the strong performance and efficiency the startup has experienced over the years. As demand for AI compute surges, Google’s TPUs and Broadcom’s custom chips are becoming critical components for leading AI developers.
