저자: ChipStockInvestor채널운영자 · 외국인
요약 보기
브로드컴 실적 발표 후 주가가 10% 이상 하락했으나, 이는 기존 기대치 내 결과이며 장기 수익성 전망은 유지된다는 주장. AI 반도체 매출이 성장을 견인하고 인프라 소프트웨어는 둔화 중. FY27 AI 반도체 매출 100억달러 이상 가이던스는 유지, 구글 TPU IP 계약 2031년까지 연장, 앤트로픽 TPU 접근 확대 언급. 채널은 보유 입장을 유지한다고 밝힘.
다듬은 글
Welcome everyone to Chip Stock Investor. We did the update after Nvidia earnings a couple weeks ago. It seems only fair and right that we would also do the world's second-largest semiconductor company after their earnings as well. That would of course be Broadcom. Broadcom built itself into this position not just with semiconductors, but also software, specifically infrastructure management software.
The latest acquisition a couple years ago was VMware. Broadcom is a fabless chip designer, especially of networking chips for AI data centers. They provide lots of IP, especially for Google and its TPU, Tensor Processing Unit program, as well as Meta and a couple other hyperscaler customers and AI lab customers like Anthropic and OpenAI.
And still little-known fact, Broadcom is still a bit in the IDM business. They do manufacture some of their own wafers, especially indium phosphide, InP, for those optical networking products. Ninety percent of their wafers roughly are still sourced from TSMC, but worth pointing out that there is still that little bit of IDM business here.
So diversified business. But investors are wondering after yet another pretty fantastic report for Q2 of fiscal 2026. Why did the stock fall over ten percent after their earnings report? I mean, this is just a pretty incredible five-year run, CAGR of over fifty percent. For Broadcom, this is their enterprise value, so market cap plus net debt that they have on balance.
This chart provided by our friends over at fiscal.ai. You can still get fifteen percent off your own fiscal plan if you use our special link, fiscal.ai/csi. Check it out in the description below. We're gonna take a look at a couple of charts from Fiscal. They update the financials very quickly, usually within the hour after a company reports earnings.
That is a fantastic feature if you are trying to figure out what is going on during earning season. But if you just look at this chart, the simplest explanation for what happened after earnings is, well, stocks don't just go up and to the right in a straight line. Sometimes stocks go down too, even if the earnings report is really, really good.
I know that's not an answer that some of you like. Some of you, I expect, will probably have something to say about that in the comments. We expect a better explanation than just stocks go up and sometimes they go down, but that is just the simple fact and truth of the matter. Stocks can tend to continue to rise gradually over time, not because of what just happened on an earnings report, but based on changes in expected profitability down the road.
Broadcom reports in two broad-based segments. In red, we have semiconductor solutions, which includes AI semiconductors and in blue is the infrastructure software with VMware making up the bulk of that these days. So regarding those future expectations of profitability, you can see that the infrastructure software business has started to flatline a bit.
We are now expecting less than ten percent year-over-year growth for infrastructure software. The price increases that Broadcom implemented have kind of mostly run their course, and this is now more of a cash cow for Broadcom, like it has been in the past with their other acquisitions in this area. It is the semiconductor solutions and especially the AI semiconductors, including the TPUs and attached networking that Broadcom provides its top customer, like Google, that is actually driving the growth.
Of that nearly forty-eight billion in trailing 12-month sales for the semiconductor solutions, we are homing in on about three-quarters of that being specifically AI semiconductors. And while there continue to be a lot of Wall Street analyst questions about the gross margins slightly decreasing because of that mix skewing more towards semiconductors and less the infrastructure software, overall, it is the operating profit and profit on a per share basis that matters the most.
Broadcom is still very much exhibiting positive operating leverage. Diluted earnings per share continue to grow at a very fast pace, as does free cash flow on a per share basis. On that latter metric, in particular, free cash flow in the latest quarter, Q2, was at a whopping forty-six percent profit margin.
The actual free cash flow itself was a record. But on a margin basis, we are still climbing back towards the free cash flow margin record of close to fifty percent. It was at forty-six percent this quarter, so there is still room to run for Broadcom on this profitability metric. So as good as that was, though, all of this ultimately was already expected.
The very first question that came in for CEO Hock Tan on the earnings call, it basically got right to the point. Why didn't we get a revision higher in earnings expectations? The question essentially was, you've guided for over a hundred billion in AI semiconductor revenue in twenty twenty-seven, almost two X what it is expected to be this year in fiscal twenty twenty-six.
And the question was, why haven't you just increased this guidance to more like two hundred billion in expected AI semiconductor revenue? The short answer is Hock Tan said, "We're not trying to guide you every quarter on what twenty twenty-seven would be like. We're just leaving it unchanged at this point." It's kind of general in excess of a hundred billion in twenty twenty-seven.
It's on the same trajectory as this year. More doubling of the revenue for the AI semiconductors is expected, both the custom chips like the TPU for Google and MTIA for Meta. But Broadcom is just simply not ready to provide a more concrete number yet. And without a more concrete number, we're just not likely to see really radical increases in earnings expectations for twenty twenty-seven and beyond.
So a bit of patience here is required. I think the good news is we are still sitting on some really fantastic year-over-year growth numbers for the stock, so we certainly are not complaining. Now, there were some interesting items that came out here in the last couple of months. The first actually takes us all the way back to beginning of April, when Broadcom had this SEC filing saying that they've re-upped the relationship with Google and supplying IP for the TPUs through twenty thirty-one.
Now, there is, and really has been for some time now, a diverse mix of customers that provide IP for Google because it makes TPUs not just for the data centers, but also mobile TPUs, for the Pixel phones. So no real surprise here, but Broadcom is the lead supplier of that IP, and that will continue to be the case, it appears, for the next five years or so.
In addition to that, Anthropic is also going to get access to those TPUs provided by Broadcom. Hock Tan actually said on the earnings call that Apollo is providing some of the debt financing, for this deal, for customers like Anthropic to be able to access this high-performance compute capacity. And separately, Blackstone is also working on some debt financing in a similar fashion.
All of this is going to be subsidized. Basically, the interest rate on that debt will be lowered because Broadcom is going to provide some sort of residual value guarantee on those TPUs, should Anthropic or other customers go bust. So that does add a bit of risk for Broadcom in the event that that were to happen.
Separately, we also saw more recently, Google raising financing via sale of stock, not debt, and the lead investor in that round of equity financing was, of course, Berkshire Hathaway, now under the guidance of Greg Abel. So if you're looking for a good way to diversify from the AI supply chain, I suppose you could say Berkshire Hathaway perhaps is that diversifier getting a bit of a discount on the Google stock, but the bulk of the business very much not an AI business.
So there's your idea for portfolio diversification and portfolio resilience in the future should things get a bit dicier for the AI data center trade. But as it stands right now for the accelerated computing and AI data center infrastructure market there at the top, we are still seeing re-accelerating growth in this segment this year.
Broadcom's guidance for Q3 implied a more than eighty percent year-over-year increase in overall revenue driven by those AI semiconductors and IP. But notable things happening beyond just that, some of the questions on the earnings call also asked about enterprise customers. The third line down, that is a newer growth cycle that has emerged.
A lot of those enterprise customers and some of their legacy IT is making its journey over to the cloud via consumption of AI tokens. That could be through some of the hyperscaler infrastructure that's provided by Google Cloud, Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Oracle. Some of that also going via the Neo clouds like Coreweave and Nebius.
As time goes on, we expect to see this expand into on-prem data centers, and we're also starting to see this trickle into the mobile network and internet infrastructure providers themselves. All of this, of course, could provide possible customer diversification for Broadcom as it provides especially the networking equipment.
But as it stands right now, the main driver for Broadcom is those lead customers like Google and Meta. So in conclusion, for us here at Chip Stock Investor, yes, the stock reacted immediately after hours in perhaps a not so great a fashion, but the stock had already run up leading up to this report.
We didn't get any real new information that led to some sort of massive revision to the upside in earnings, and that's okay. It's the middle of the fiscal year for Broadcom. We didn't expect to see any crazy revelation, of new data points, or new things to factor into our long-term outlook. And so we are unchanged in our expectations for Broadcom, more than happy to continue holding this stock and a basket of other companies related to AI data center infrastructure build-out in the semiconductor space.
That's it for now. Remember to check out fiscal.ai/csi for that fifteen percent discount on any paid plan, and we'll see you again here real soon at Chip Stock Investor. Take care, everyone.
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