Broadcom shares slide as investors weigh a potential TPU supply shift from 2028

Broadcom (AVGO) came under pressure after a market report flagged potential turbulence in the company’s artificial intelligence custom silicon position tied to Google’s TPU road map. The concern centers on the prospect that, starting in 2028, Google could shift certain media and compute components to chips sourced from MediaTek, a change that could alter demand expectations for Broadcom-related designs.

The report notes that Broadcom faced a “3%” decline on the day of publication, reflecting how quickly investors can reprice even the possibility of a platform-level sourcing change in the AI supply chain. Rather than alleging that Broadcom had lost an existing contract, the market focus appears to be on what Google’s longer-dated sourcing decisions could imply for Broadcom’s forward narrative around custom ASICs (application-specific integrated circuits), which are chips designed for a specific customer or workload rather than general-purpose silicon.

In this framing, the key swing factor is Google’s timeline. If Google’s 2028 approach to certain components leans more heavily on MediaTek, the market could reduce the weight it assigns to Broadcom capturing incremental custom silicon opportunities tied to that cycle. The report also suggests the opposite implication for MediaTek, namely that revised estimates could tilt upward if MediaTek becomes more involved in late-2020s plans.

The article’s emphasis is therefore less about near-term revenue mechanics and more about the credibility of “custom chip” demand assumptions. For semiconductor investors, custom ASIC narratives often matter because they can underpin expectations that a customer’s unique performance requirements will keep steering workloads toward a smaller set of tightly integrated suppliers, potentially supporting margins and share in high-value deployments.

AI hardware remains a competitive battleground where platform owners, including hyperscalers, increasingly manage performance, power efficiency, and manufacturing schedules as tightly as they manage model performance. In that environment, even a partial platform shift between suppliers can reverberate through expectations across multiple companies that are tied to the custom-silicon ecosystem, either directly through designs or indirectly through perceived pipeline exposure.

At the same time, the current information is not presented as a confirmed operational change. The report characterizes the potential 2028 shift as a possibility and frames the impact through market expectations rather than a disclosed award, amendment, or canceled agreement involving Broadcom. Broadcom did not provide additional details in the post, and the report does not, based on what is described here, specify which exact TPU-related components could be affected or how much of the broader workload stack would be implicated.

What to watch next is whether Broadcom or any major customer indicates updates that move this from scenario analysis to disclosed procurement direction. Traders and analysts will likely focus on subsequent commentary around AI accelerator supply chains, any confirmation of 2028 planning assumptions, and whether MediaTek-related estimate changes continue to expand or retract as new information emerges.