Broadcom rises on its latest AI infrastructure innovations

Broadcom (NASDAQ:AVGO) ticked up 3% during late afternoon trading Wednesday after the company unveiled its latest artificial intelligence infrastructure offerings during an investor meeting.

“For providers contending with the ever-increasing demand for generative AI clusters, the key to success will be a network-centric platform, based on open solutions, that scales at the lowest power,” said Charlie Kawwas, president of Broadcom’s semiconductor solutions group.

Broadcom presented a broad portfolio of technologies to enable large-scale AI infrastructure.

"When you talk AI, everything has changed, because with AI you have these elephant workloads that cannot run on a single processor," Kawwas said. "Whether it's a GPU, TPU, NPU, the flavor of the day ... you take some of these elephant workloads, you can't run them on a single unit. You can't even run them on eight. You have to now scale into the thousands of these. You have to scale out to lots of networks. And without a connectivity strategy, this will not work. This will not scale up."

Broadcom engineers have focused on ways to scale it. These include products such as the Bailly CPO Ethernet switch, the Tomahawk 5, the Trident 5-X12 chip with neural network and the Jericho3-AI fabric for AI networks.

“The innovations we’ve introduced extend our leadership for custom AI accelerators, Ethernet, PCI Express and optical interconnect portfolios," Kawwas added.

Barclays said Broadcom is best suited to take advantage of the "second wave of AI," and set its price target on the stock to $1,405.

Jefferies analysts also named it one of the top 10 stocks to buy.

Other chip stocks were slightly down today. Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) slipped 1% and Super Micro Computer (SMCI) fell 2%.