Broadcom reveals Anthropic as mystery customer behind $21 billion Google TPU order

Broadcom reveals its mystery $10 billion customer is Anthropic

A Broadcom sign is pictured as the company prepares to launch new optical chip tech to fend off Nvidia in San Jose, California, U.S., September 5, 2025. Broadcom revealed during a September earnings call that it had signed a customer that had placed a $10 billion order for custom chips. At the time, Broadcom didn't say who it was, but on Thursday, CEO Hock Tan revealed that the mystery customer was AI lab Anthropic, which placed an order for the latest Google tensor processing units. "We received a $10 billion order to sell the latest TPU Ironwood racks to Anthropic," said Tan, speaking on Broadcom's fourth-quarter earnings call on Thursday. He also said Anthropic had placed an additional $11 billion order with Broadcom in the company's latest quarter. While Broadcom typically doesn't disclose its large customers, Tan's September remark drew significant investor attention amid the AI infrastructure boom. A Broadcom official told CNBC in October that the mystery customer wasn't OpenAI, which has its own agreement to purchase chips from the chipmaker. Broadcom makes custom chips called ASICs, which some experts believe are more efficient for certain artificial intelligence algorithms than the market-dominating chips from Nvidia. Broadcom helps make Google's TPUs, and last month, the search company bragged that it trained its state-of-the-art Gemini 3 model entirely on its TPUs. The chipmaker calls its custom AI chips XPUs, and on Thursday, Tan said his company was delivering entire server racks -- not just chips -- to Anthropic, which is Broadcom's fourth XPU customer. Broadcom on Thursday also said that it has secured a fifth customer for its custom chip business. That customer placed a $1 billion order during the fourth quarter, but once again, Broadcom did not reveal the customer.

Broadcom Reveals $21 Billion Google TPUs Order from Anthropic | AIM

Broadcom disclosed during its Q4 2025 earnings call that it received a $10 billion order in the previous quarter to supply Google's latest Tensor Processing Units (TPUs) to Anthropic. "In Q4, we received an additional $11 billion order from this same customer for delivery in late 2026," said Hock Tan, CEO of Broadcom. This brings Anthropic's total TPU orders to $21 billion. Furthermore, the company revealed a $73 billion backlog of AI product orders, which are expected to be shipped over the next six quarters (18 months). TPUs are specialised accelerators developed by Google for AI workloads. Now in their seventh generation, TPUs are available to customers through Google Cloud and power many of Google's internal systems, including training and deployment of the Gemini family of models. Google designs the TPU architecture, while Broadcom converts those designs into manufacturable silicon and handles volume production. The relationship mirrors Google's long-standing strategy of controlling key AI hardware design while relying on semiconductor partners for fabrication expertise. Anthropic, a long-term user of TPUs, recently announced plans to significantly scale its infrastructure. The company intends to deploy one million TPUs, backed by more than one gigawatt of new compute capacity coming online in 2026. This represents one of the largest dedicated AI compute buildouts in the industry. Several other companies have also confirmed their use of TPUs, including Meta, Cohere, Apple and Ilya Sutskever's new startup, Super Safe Intelligence (SSI). A report from The Information indicates that Meta is evaluating the deployment of TPUs in its data centres starting in 2027. The growing adoption of TPUs stems from their power efficiency and tight optimisation for AI training and inference, creating increasing competitive pressure on NVIDIA's GPU dominance. Broadcom said it now has five TPU/XPU (custom AI accelerator) customers -- with Google and Anthropic named on the call. Reports and industry analysis indicate that Meta and ByteDance are also among its custom AI chip customers, though Broadcom has not publicly confirmed the full roster. The rise of TPUs over the years, thanks to their power efficiency and being fine-tuned to specifically handle AI workloads, poses a challenge to NVIDIA's dominance with GPUs. According to new analysis from SemiAnalysis, TPU v7 demonstrates that although it has roughly 10% lower peak floating-point operations per second (FLOPs) and memory bandwidth than NVIDIA's GB200 platform, it still delivers a stronger performance-per-total-cost-of-ownership (TCO) profile. SemiAnalysis estimates that Google's internal cost to deploy Ironwood is about 44% lower than deploying an equivalent NVIDIA system. Even when priced for external customers, TPUv7 offers an estimated 30% lower TCO than NVIDIA's GB200, and roughly 41% lower TCO than the upcoming GB300. SemiAnalysis notes that if Anthropic achieves around 40% machine-fraction utilisation (MFU) on TPUs -- a realistic figure given the company's compiler and systems expertise -- the effective training cost per FLOP could be 50-60% lower than what GB300-class GPU clusters are expected to deliver.