When Elon Musk announced plans to expand xAI’s Colossus AI supercomputer from 100,000 GPUs today to 1 million GPUs in the future, the plan seemed overwhelming. But xAI will not be alone in having such a gargantuan supercomputer. Broadcom predicts that three of its clients, among hyperscalers, will deploy AI supercomputers with one million XPUs in fiscal 2027.
“As you know, we currently have three hyperscale customers who have developed their own multi-generational AI XPU roadmap to be deployed at varying rates over the next three years,” said Hock Tan, President and CEO of Broadcom, at the company’s Q4 2024 earnings call. “In 2027, we believe each of them plans to deploy 1,000,000 XPU clusters across a single fabric.”
In addition to serving three major hyperscaler customers, Broadcom disclosed during the call that it had landed orders from two more ‘hyperscalers and is in advanced development for their own next-generation AI XPUs.’ It was rumored that ByteDance and OpenAI teamed up with Broadcom to develop their AI chips. Broadcom, of course, does not mention names.
Broadcom develops chips for AI, general-purpose data processing, or custom data center hardware — for multiple big-name companies, including Google and Meta. Broadcom and its customers identify the workload demands, such as AI training, inference, or data processing. Then, the company and its partners define the specifications of their chips and develop key aspects of their main differentiators, such as the architecture of processing units, leveraging Broadcom’s expertise in silicon design. Broadcom then implements this architecture in silicon and equips it with platform-specific IP, caches, inter-chip interconnects, and interfaces. Broadcom-designed high-performance XPUs are then manufactured by TSMC.
Broadcom may sell its XPUs or custom ASICs directly to customers with long-term supply agreements depending on the contract with a particular customer. In addition, Broadcom may assist in developing products, charging for collaborative engineering and/or research and development efforts.
Broadcom’s XPU business is a key ingredient of its strategy to capitalize on the growing demand for AI and cloud infrastructure, making it a critical player in the AI hardware ecosystem. The company believes that in 2027, the serviceable addressable market (SAM) for AI XPU and networking will be between $60 and $90 billion, and the firm is positioned to command a leading share of this market. It is unclear how the company counts SAM, though, as this year, Nvidia alone will earn about $100 billion selling its GPUs, DPUs, and networking hardware to the AI market.