Broadcom CEO names Anthropic as largest XPU customer, signaling massive AI hardware shift

Broadcom CEO Hock Tan just handed investors a pretty clear signal about where the AI infrastructure wars are heading. During the company’s Q3 2026 earnings call, Tan revealed that Anthropic, the Claude AI maker, is on track to become Broadcom’s single largest customer for custom AI accelerators, known as XPUs, in 2027. And it’s expected to hold that top spot into 2028. The numbers behind Anthropic’s compute build-out Anthropic’s hardware ambitions are staggering even by the standards of the current AI arms race. The company placed a $10 billion order for Google TPU Ironwood racks back in December 2025, followed by an additional order valued at $11 billion. The deployment timeline paints an equally aggressive picture. Anthropic is planning 1 gigawatt of TPU capacity in 2026, scaling to 5 GW of TPU v8i capacity in 2027, with the potential to reach 10 GW in 2028. Broadcom has already begun production shipments of the next-generation TPU v8i, which will power a significant chunk of that planned capacity. The company is also supplying custom accelerators for OpenAI’s Jalapeño chips, meaning Broadcom is quietly becoming the foundry of choice for the two most prominent frontier AI labs on...