VMware 9.0 and AI Push Broadcom to Record Highs

Broadcom’s latest earnings report makes one thing clear: the company is leaning heavily on artificial intelligence and VMware to fuel its next chapter of growth. The chipmaker delivered stronger-than-expected Q3 results, closed a $10 billion AI chip order, and outlined plans for continued expansion in both its networking and infrastructure software businesses.

“Turning to AI networking, demand continued to be strong because networking is becoming critical as LLMs continue to evolve in intelligence, and compute clusters have to grow bigger,” Hock Tan, president and CEO of Broadcom, told analysts on the company’s Q3 earnings call. “The network is the computer, and our customers are facing challenges as they scale to clusters beyond 100,000 compute nodes.” 

VMware integration delivers results

The VMware acquisition, which closed in late 2023, is already proving its worth. Tan pointed to VMware Cloud Foundation 9.0 as a major milestone.

“Here is what I’m most excited about,” added Tan. “After two years of engineering development by over 5,000 developers, we delivered on a promise when we acquired VMware. We released VMware Cloud Foundation 9.0. It enables enterprises to run any application workload, including AI workloads, on virtual machines and on modern containers. This provides the real alternative to public cloud.”

Broadcom expects its infrastructure software business to bring in $6.7 billion in Q4, a 15% jump from last year. Pair that with the momentum from AI, and the company projects total Q4 revenue of approximately $17.4 billion. That’s up 24% year-over-year.

A record quarter and a massive AI order

Broadcom pulled in $15.95 billion in Q3 revenue, going slightly over Wall Street’s $15.82 billion projection. The bigger story, though, was profitability. The company posted $4.14 billion in net income after reporting a loss in the same quarter last year.

Unsurprisingly, AI played a major role in this flip. Broadcom landed a massive $10 billion order for custom AI chips, strengthening its position as a go-to supplier for companies that don’t want to rely solely on Nvidia or AMD. The news sent Broadcom’s stock up 15% in a single day, tacking more than $200 billion onto its market value.

Broadcom expects “significantly improved” AI revenue growth in fiscal 2026, with some analysts projecting sales could exceed $40 billion.

Hock Tan commits to the long haul

Tan also announced he will continue as CEO through at least 2030. “These are exciting times for Broadcom, and I’m very enthusiastic to continue to drive value for our shareholders,” he said.

With AI networking, VMware integration, and multibillion-dollar custom chip orders all in play, Broadcom is positioning itself squarely at the center of enterprise computing’s next wave.

The momentum also ties back to December, when Vultr teamed up with Juniper Networks, AMD, and Broadcom on a new GPU data center architecture, highlighting how collaboration is driving the next wave of AI innovation.