Broadcom pairs Hock Tan AI-spend warning with security push

Broadcom's current story rests on two things at once: the AI data center bets that pull in large, multi year commitments, and the VMware software platform that rides on top of them. The announcements at the OCP Global Summit, including high speed AI networking and Link Layer Retry interoperability, sit on the infrastructure side, while VMware HyperArmor sits on the software side. The company frames HyperArmor as fitting directly into its Private AI Cloud push and wider security stack. More AI infrastructure also raises the attack surface, which is the live risk the security tools address. The company's own narrative projects US$317.5b revenue and US$155.8b earnings by 2029, assuming revenue growth of 52.7% per year and an earnings increase of about US$117.5b from US$38.3b today. Against that, the guided gross margin move from 77.1% in Q2 2026 to 73% in Q4 2026 and the roughly US$29b of residual value guarantees tie the story to how bookings and margins actually land. Investors may read customer uptake of HyperArmor and related VCF security tools as a signal of how sticky the software franchise becomes, though that is an inference rather than a company projection.