Who Is Broadcom’s Mystery Customer? Wall Street Has Some Guesses.

Broadcom stock was up 75% this year heading into its earnings report, and before Friday’s selloff. (Chris Ratcliffe/Bloomberg)

Key Points

• Broadcom’s stock fell 11% after its CEO’s remarks on the earnings call disappointed investors who expected a large AI chip deal.
• Broadcom identified Anthropic as a customer with an additional $11 billion AI chip order for delivery in late 2026.
• A mystery fifth customer placed a $1 billion AI chip order for late 2026 delivery, leading to speculation about its identity.

There’s a big question on Wall Street: Who is Broadcom’s mystery fifth customer for its artificial-intelligence chips?

The identity of the company might be the key to where the semiconductor company’s stock price goes from here, after disappointing CEO remarks on the earnings call.

Broadcom faced elevated expectations heading into its financial results, after a 75% run-up in its shares this year. Investors were likely hoping for a large AI chip deal announcement from a new customer.

That didn’t happen. Instead, Broadcom unveiled several things that, in aggregate, fell short, sending the stock down 11% Friday.

For context, on the company’s previous earnings call in September, Broadcom CEO Hock Tan said his company had secured $10 billion in AI orders from a new qualified customer, which he said would “significantly” improve the AI revenue outlook for fiscal 2026.

On the latest earnings call Thursday evening, Tan identified that customer as Anthropic, noting that the AI model start-up ordered an additional $11 billion of AI chips for delivery in late 2026. That’s the good news, but then things got confusing.

The executive also said there was a fifth customer for AI chips that ordered $1 billion of chips for delivery in late 2026, but didn’t reveal the firm’s identity, despite multiple questions from analysts.

The uncertainty over the identity of the fifth customer isn’t helping Broadcom shares. Broadcom didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

Investors want to know if the customer is a large technology company that can place additional big orders in coming years—and whether it is on top of the expected contributions from its deal with OpenAI for 2027 and beyond. Right now, no one knows.

“We think investors believed the fifth customer to be OpenAI,” TD Cowen analyst Joshua Buchalter wrote. “A $1B order would be well below that expected contribution, and thus we think it is not OpenAI.”

In October, OpenAI and Broadcom announced a partnership to develop and deploy 10 gigawatts of custom artificial-intelligence accelerators.

Others on Wall Street also said the fifth customer likely wasn’t OpenAI. J.P. Morgan analyst Harlan Sur said he thought it was SoftBank. KeyBanc’s John Vinh said it could be Amazon Web Services. Jefferies analyst Blayne Curtis speculated it may be Apple.

Until there is visibility into identity and the potential of larger AI orders from the fifth customer, share price volatility for Broadcom isn’t likely to end.

Write to Tae Kim at tae.kim@barrons.com