Broadcom reveals its mystery $10 billion customer is Anthropic

Broadcom revealed during a September net telephone that it had signed a lawsuit that had placed a $10 cardinal bid for customized chips.

At the time, Broadcom didn't accidental who it was, but connected Thursday, CEO Hock Tan revealed that the enigma lawsuit was AI laboratory Anthropic, which placed an bid for the latest Google tensor processing units.

"We received a $10 cardinal bid to merchantability the latest TPU Ironwood racks to Anthropic," said Tan, speaking connected Broadcom's fourth-quarter earnings telephone connected Thursday. He besides said Anthropic had placed an further $11 cardinal bid with Broadcom successful the company's latest quarter.

While Broadcom typically doesn't disclose its ample customers, Tan's September remark drew important capitalist attraction amid the AI infrastructure boom. A Broadcom authoritative told CNBC successful October that the enigma lawsuit wasn't OpenAI, which has its ain statement to acquisition chips from the chipmaker.

Broadcom makes customized chips called ASICs, which immoderate experts judge are much businesslike for definite artificial quality algorithms than the market-dominating chips from Nvidia. Broadcom helps marque Google's TPUs, and past month, the hunt institution bragged that it trained its state-of-the-art Gemini 3 exemplary wholly connected its TPUs.

The chipmaker calls its customized AI chips XPUs, and connected Thursday, Tan said his institution was delivering full server racks — not conscionable chips — to Anthropic, which is Broadcom's 4th XPU customer.

Broadcom connected Thursday besides said that it has secured a 5th lawsuit for its customized spot business. That lawsuit placed a $1 cardinal bid during the 4th quarter, but erstwhile again, Broadcom did not uncover the customer.

"It's a existent customer, and it volition grow," Tan said.

In precocious October, Anthropic and Google announced a sweeping unreality concern that underscored conscionable however rapidly the AI infrastructure contention is moving.

The deal is valued successful the tens of billions of dollars. The statement gives Anthropic entree to arsenic galore 1 cardinal Google TPUs, and is expected to bring good implicit a gigawatt of caller AI compute capableness online successful 2026.

Anthropic employs a multi-cloud, multi-chip strategy.

The startup spreads workloads crossed Google's TPUs, Amazon's customized Trainium chips and Nvidia graphics processing units. Anthropic's assorted models are tuned to tally connected whichever level makes the astir consciousness for training, inference oregon research.

For Google, Anthropic's stake connected TPUs is precisely the benignant of validation investors person been rewarding, arsenic Wall Street progressively ties Alphabet's banal run-up to wide request for its in-house AI chips.

Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian antecedently said Anthropic's determination to dramatically grow its TPU usage reflects "the beardown price-performance and efficiency" the startup has seen implicit respective years.

After much than a decennary of interior development, Google is making TPUs wide disposable to unreality customers arsenic a service, alternatively than selling the hardware outright, and has been leaning connected its chips arsenic a differentiator arsenic it tries to support gait with surging request for AI compute.

Analysts person described TPUs arsenic the astir credible alternate to Nvidia's GPUs. Analysts person argued that Google's tightly tailored ASICs and power-efficient designs could go a meaningful operator of the company's unreality concern maturation arsenic powerfulness constraints — not spot proviso — look arsenic the cardinal bottleneck for AI.