In a Monday afternoon filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Broadcom added some certainty to its relationship with Alphabet, for which it designs artificial-intelligence chips. Broadcom stock rose about 2.5% in after-hours trading. Alphabet shares were unchanged.
Though it has become a crowded field, in 2015 Alphabet's Google was the first to make its own custom chips for AI: The Tensor Processing Unit, or TPU. It's now on its seventh generation, called Ironwood. Broadcom has been co-designing the chips since at least 2016.
The new agreement firms up the relationship through 2031, and also assures that Broadcom's networking equipment will also be part of TPU deployment in data centers. The agreement underlines Broadcom's position as a major AI chip designer behind industry leader Nvidia.
Also included in the announcement was an extension of Google and Broadcom's 2025 TPU agreement with AI-startup Anthropic, which will dramatically increase Anthropic's use of TPUs to run its Claude AI model next year.