Broadcom Inc. shares fell following a report that Alphabet Inc.’s Google is considering dropping the company as a supplier of artificial intelligence chips as soon as 2027.
(Bloomberg) — Broadcom Inc. shares fell following a report that Alphabet Inc.’s Google is considering dropping the company as a supplier of artificial intelligence chips as soon as 2027.
The Information reported Thursday that Google executives had set a goal earlier this year to move away from Broadcom after a prolonged standoff over the price it pays for chips, citing an unidentified person familiar. Separately, the search-engine giant has worked since last year to shift to Marvell Technology Inc. for chips that connect servers to Ethernet switches, the Information said.
“We are productively engaged with Broadcom and multiple other suppliers for the long term,” a Google spokesperson said by email. “Our work to meet our internal and external Cloud needs benefit from our collaboration with Broadcom; they have been an excellent partner and we see no change in our engagement.”
Broadcom didn’t respond to requests for comment. The company’s shares fell as much as 4.3% earlier on Thursday after the report but pared losses after Google’s statement. The stock was down 2.2% at $812.23 at 12:25 p.m. New York time.
Tech companies including Google and Microsoft Corp. have poured money into developing AI models, helping fuel a boom among semiconductor makers that can produce chips for the technology. Broadcom Chief Executive Officer Hock Tan had told investors in June that he expected AI-related chip sales could account for more than a quarter of the company’s revenue soon.
Google Cloud announced a program to design tensor processing units, tailor-made for a branch of AI called neural network machine learning, in 2016. The Information suggested that Google could fully design the chips in-house if it ended up dropping Broadcom in the future.
(Updates with Google comment in third paragraph, shares in fourth.)
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