Broadcom Could Outpace Nvidia as AI Market Shifts to Inference

Technology companies have provided as much as $300 billion in guarantees to finance artificial intelligence data centers and chips over the past year, helping support the construction boom without immediately recording most of the exposure as debt, the Financial Times reported Sunday. Meta pioneered the use of residual value guarantees for a major data center project last year, and Broadcom has since used them to support chip sales connected to Anthropic, while Nvidia has offered similar backing for infrastructure serving OpenAI and other customers. The guarantees set a minimum future value for computing equipment or data centers owned by special-purpose entities, and if an asset is eventually sold or leased for less than that amount, the technology company may have to cover part of the shortfall. Morgan Stanley estimates that seven major cloud and chip companies have accumulated more than $3.1 trillion in off-balance-sheet commitments and other forms of credit support. Broadcom provided about $29 billion in backing for a special-purpose vehicle that will buy chips and lease them to Anthropic, Nvidia offered to support as much as 25% of certain financing packages and provided $105 billion in guarantees to SB Energy for an Ohio data center campus intended for OpenAI, and Meta supplied a $28 billion guarantee for its Hyperion data center venture with Blue Owl in Louisiana. Credit-rating agencies assess how much the promised value exceeds an asset's likely price under stressed conditions and may add that difference to their leverage calculations, and while analysts generally have concluded the assets provide enough collateral to limit expected losses, investors will need to monitor whether that remains true as AI hardware ages and financing commitments grow.

Marvell Technology and GlobalFoundries have expanded their multi-year agreement to increase production capacity for silicon germanium, or SiGe, at GlobalFoundries' facility in Burlington, Vermont, sending Marvell shares up more than 4% and GlobalFoundries shares up more than 6% on September 17. SiGe is a semiconductor technology used in high-speed optical connections for data centers, allowing devices to operate at higher speeds while using less energy. Robb Johnson, Vice President of Foundry Technology at Marvell, said the expanded collaboration will help ensure the company has the SiGe technology and manufacturing capacity to support the significant growth it expects ahead, and the added capacity will help Marvell meet growing demand for optical networking products including pluggable optical transceivers, near-packaged optics, and co-packaged optics. GlobalFoundries reported $1.786 billion in revenue for the second quarter of 2026, up 6% year over year, with its communications infrastructure and data center segment accounting for about 16% of total revenue and growing 20% sequentially and 62% year over year, and CEO Tim Breen said demand for SiGe remains strong and the company is oversubscribed throughout 2027. Marvell reported record net revenue of $2.739 billion in the second quarter of fiscal 2027, up 37% year over year, and Chairman and CEO Matt Murphy said AI-related bookings remain exceptionally robust as the company raised its revenue outlook for fiscal 2027 and fiscal 2028.