New York, February 12, 2026, 10:26 (EST) — Regular session
Broadcom Inc shares were down about 1.1% at $338.84 in morning trading on Thursday, after earlier touching $346.23. The stock last closed at $342.76.
The move lands as investors keep using Broadcom as a read-through on how hard customers are spending to build out AI data centers — and what that means for chip demand and pricing. U.S. stocks opened slightly higher after a recent burst of job growth and a dip in unemployment eased worries about the economy, while focus drifted back to corporate earnings. (Reuters)
On Tuesday, UBS reiterated a Buy rating and a $475 price target on Broadcom, pointing to what it called accelerating demand for the company’s TPU (Tensor Processing Unit) products. UBS analyst Timothy Arcuri projected Broadcom would ship about 3.7 million TPU units in 2026, rising to more than 5 million units in 2027, and estimated AI revenue of about $60 billion for fiscal 2026. (Investing)
“Many have turned to TPU as an intermediate alternative to GPU and we believe demand is accelerating significantly,” Arcuri wrote in a note cited by Barron’s. TPU demand matters because it can pull spending away from GPUs — graphics processing units that dominate AI training — while TPUs can be cheaper for “inference,” the process of generating answers from trained models. (Barron’s)
Competition is tightening in the networking layer too. Cisco this week launched a new switch chip and router aimed at speeding up traffic inside giant AI data centers, a market where Broadcom’s Tomahawk line is a key product; Cisco executive Martin Lund said the chip includes “shock absorber” features meant to keep networks from bogging down during spikes in traffic. (Reuters)
The custom-silicon race is also widening beyond U.S. hyperscalers. TikTok owner ByteDance is developing an AI chip and is in talks with Samsung Electronics to manufacture it, two people familiar with the matter told Reuters, as the company seeks more control over supply; ByteDance called the information inaccurate, while Samsung declined to comment. Reuters noted it had previously reported ByteDance was working with Broadcom on an advanced AI processor. (Reuters)
The near-term push and pull is familiar: upbeat demand checks and new programs can lift the story, while any hint of tougher pricing or lost share can hit the stock fast. In chips, investors don’t wait for quarterly numbers if they think the cycle has turned.
But the downside case has not gone away. Broadcom warned in December that a richer mix of lower-margin custom AI processors would pressure profitability, even as it pointed to a $73 billion backlog it expected to ship over the next 18 months; “hitting that panic button is premature,” Melius Research analyst Ben Reitzes said at the time. (Reuters)
Broadcom sells both semiconductor products and infrastructure software, with business lines that range from wireless connectivity and custom silicon to cloud and security software, according to its Reuters company profile. CEO Hock Tan has pushed the company deeper into enterprise software alongside the chip franchise. (Reuters)
The next hard catalyst is March 4, when Broadcom is due to report first-quarter fiscal 2026 results after the close and host a 5 p.m. Eastern conference call. Guidance on AI chip demand, networking wins and the margin trade-off will likely set the tone into next week. (Stocktitan)
