Broadcom is quietly becoming the most important company in AI that nobody outside Wall Street talks about.

After meetings with CEO Hock Tan and senior executives, Mizuho Securities raised its AI revenue projection for Broadcom to approximately $120 billion by 2027, up from the Wall Street consensus of $100 billion at the start of the year. Analyst Vijay Rakesh maintained a $480 price target and "Outperform" rating. The revision is not based on optimism. It is based on signed contracts.

Six clients. Six of the biggest companies on Earth.

Broadcom now serves six major custom AI silicon clients: Alphabet, Meta, ByteDance, Fujitsu, OpenAI, and at least one unnamed partner. The company designs the custom chips that power these companies' AI workloads. It is contractually bound to design future versions of Google's Tensor Processing Units through at least 2031. OpenAI entered a ten-year agreement for ten gigawatts of capacity through 2029.

The Meta deal, announced April 14, is the most revealing. It extends their partnership through 2029 and will see Broadcom design, package, and network Meta's next-generation MTIA chips. These will be the first AI chips ever produced using a cutting-edge 2-nanometer process. Initial deployment starts at over one gigawatt of capacity, with plans to scale to a multi-gigawatt rollout.

The numbers are already enormous

For Q1 fiscal 2026, Broadcom's AI revenue doubled to $8.4 billion, contributing to a 29 percent jump in total revenue to $19.3 billion. Management guidance for Q2 points to AI revenue of $10.7 billion, a 140 percent year-over-year increase. The stock has more than doubled in the past year and currently trades just 4 percent below its 52-week high.

What Broadcom is building is essentially the custom silicon layer of the AI industry. While Nvidia dominates the general-purpose GPU market, Broadcom dominates the custom accelerator market. Every major AI company that wants chips optimized specifically for its workloads goes to Broadcom. And every one of them is signing multi-year contracts.

The governance signal

One detail buried in the Broadcom story tells you everything about how intertwined this industry has become. CEO Hock Tan will step down from Meta's board at its next annual meeting, transitioning to an advisory role focused on custom chip strategy. The reason: the Meta partnership is now so large that sitting on its board while also serving Alphabet, OpenAI, and ByteDance creates untenable conflicts of interest.

When your chip company is so critical to so many competing AI giants that your CEO cannot sit on any of their boards, you are no longer a supplier. You are infrastructure. Broadcom's annual shareholder meeting is Monday. The quarterly report drops June 4. Analysts expect $2.39 EPS on $22 billion revenue. Twenty-eight analysts rate it a "Strong Buy" with targets as high as $500 from JPMorgan. The AI hardware race has a new scoreboard, and Broadcom is running it.