Broadcom Reports Surging AI Revenue with Major Anthropic Deal and $73 Billion Backlog
December 15, 2025
Broadcom Inc. has provided a clear signal of its central role in powering the artificial intelligence boom, revealing a massive and growing backlog of AI-related orders alongside the confirmation of a landmark multi-billion dollar deal with AI developer Anthropic. The disclosures, made during the company's latest earnings call, underscore how the race to build advanced AI infrastructure is creating a windfall for key semiconductor and networking suppliers.
CEO Hock Tan confirmed to investors that Anthropic was the previously undisclosed customer behind a $10 billion custom-chip deal announced earlier this year. This agreement involves Broadcom designing and supplying Google's latest generation of Tensor Processing Units (TPUs), known as Ironwood, for Anthropic's AI systems. Tan described the arrangement as a "system sale," noting, "We have so many components beyond XPUs... we believe it begins to make sense to do it as a system sales and be fully responsible for the entire system." Furthermore, Anthropic has placed an additional order valued at $11 billion, scheduled for delivery in late 2026.
The scale of Broadcom's AI business was quantified with the announcement of a $73 billion backlog of AI-related orders. Tan clarified this figure represents anticipated shipments of XPUs, switches, DSPs, and optical components for AI data centers over the next 18 months, and he expects more bookings to accumulate. "We have never seen bookings of the nature that what we have seen over the past three months," Tan stated, highlighting particularly strong demand for the company's recently launched Tomahawk 6 switch platform, which offers 102-terabytes per second of bandwidth.
In a further expansion of its custom silicon business, Broadcom secured a fifth XPU customer through a $1 billion order for delivery in late 2026. While Tan declined to name the client, he emphasized it was "a real customer" on a "multi-year journey." He also referenced a recently signed co-development agreement with OpenAI, which is expected to begin yielding results in 2027.
Beyond AI, Broadcom's VMware division continues to be a significant contributor. The infrastructure software segment, which houses VMware, saw revenues increase 26 percent to $27 billion for the full fiscal year 2025, helping drive Broadcom's total company revenue to a record $64 billion. Tan noted that over 90 percent of VMware's largest 10,000 customers have now signed up for its subscription-based Cloud Foundation platform, though full deployment of these systems remains an ongoing process expected to unfold over the next two years.
The financial results and order revelations position Broadcom as a primary beneficiary of the hyperscale investment cycle in AI hardware, with its diversified portfolio across custom silicon, networking, and enterprise software providing multiple growth engines.
Source: datacenterdynamics
