We’re deep into Broadcom’s conference call, and if you’ve been following along, you can see it’s been an all-timer.
(We thank you for joining, and hope it’s been a lot of fun and you’ve learned a lot!)
Another major exchange just happened. In short, one of Wall Street’s biggest concerns is hyperscalers like Google getting more leverage on Broadcom by moving to CoT, or ‘Customer Owned Tooling.’
One of the most knowledgeable semiconductor analysts (Harlan Sur) asked Hock Tan about this directly, and here’s what he had to say:
JPMorgan Chase & Co, Research Division
Congratulations to the team on the strong results. There’s been a lot of noise around CSPs and hyperscalers embarking on their own internal XPU TPU design efforts, right? We call it COT or customer-owned tooling. This is not a new dynamic with ASIC, right?
I think the Broadcom team has been through the COT competitive dynamic before over the 30 years, right, that you’ve been a leader in the ASIC industry and very few of these COT initiatives have ever been successful. Now on the AI, some of these COT initiatives are coming to the market now, but it looks like — they’re at these 2x less performance in your current generation solutions, 2X less complex in terms of chip design complexity, packaging complexity, IP.
So maybe just a quick 2-part question. Hock, one for you is given your visibility into next year, do you see the COT [indiscernible] projects taking any meaningful TPU XPU share from Broadcom? And then maybe the second quick question for, Charlie, is given that Broadcom’s TPU XPU programs from a performance complexity IP perspective are 12 to 18 months ahead of any of these COT programs, how does Broadcom team widen this gap further?
Chief Executive Officer
Well, that’s a great question. And it fits into that — I purposely took the time in my opening remarks to say that when any of our — any I guess, hyperscaler or LLM developer tries to create become self-sufficient entirely in creating what you call customer-owned tooling or COT model, they face tremendous challenges. One is technology. which is a technology as it relates to creating the silicon chips and particularly in XPUs that they need to do the computing and that is needed to optimize and run an inference on the workloads they produce their LLM.
It’s technology we talked about comes in from different dimensions. We need the best silicon design team around, you need cutting-edge, really cutting-edge SERDES, very advanced packaging. And most — and just as much you need to understand how to network clusters of them together. We’ve been doing this for 20 years — more than 20 years in silicon and in this particular space today in generative AI.
If you’re trying to as an LLM player to do your own chip, you cannot afford to have a chip that is just good enough. You need the best chips that is around because you’re competing against other LLM players. And most of all, you’re also competing against NVIDIA, who is by no means letting down their [ gun ]. They are producing better and better chips with every passing generation. So you have to, as an LLM, trying to establish our platform in the world, have to create chips that are better than if not competitive, not just in NVIDIA, but all the other platform players that you’re competing against.
And for that, you really need own belief, and we see that percent — partner in silicon with the best technology, IP and execution around. And very modestly, I would say, we are by far way out there. And we will not see competition in COT for many years to come. It will come eventually, but we’re still a long way off because the race which we see continues. And 1 thing I add in there that is particularly unique to us, when you create the silicon, you really have to get it up and running in high volume in production very quickly, time to market.
We are very, very experienced in doing that. Anybody can design a chip in a lab that works well. Can you produce 100,000 of those chips quickly at yields that you can — that you can afford? And we don’t see too many players in the world that can do that. Charlie?