Is Broadcom (AVGO.US) expected to benefit the biggest beneficiary of MRVL.US igniting a blowout in AI ASIC demand?

The Zhitong Finance App learned that the stock price of Maywell Technology (MRVL.US), which focuses on customized AI chips in data centers (that is, AI ASIC chips), rose more than 10% at the beginning of the US market on Wednesday. Previously, many top Wall Street analysts highly praised many technical routes and potential market announcements in the company's customized AI chip activities, and gave a strong bullish stock price stance.

As Maywell fully ignites the market's room to imagine demand for customized AI chips, other analysts emphasized that from a long-term investment perspective, Broadcom (AVGO.US), which has the title of “AI ASIC hegemon”, will be the biggest long-term beneficiary of Maywell's AI activities.

Among the most notable market announcements, two new AI ASIC chip designs from hyperscale cloud computing vendors were awarded bids. Mark Lipacis, an analyst at Wall Street investment agency Evercore ISI, said that these customized AI chip design projects are expected to rapidly ramp-up (release) within the 2026-2027 time frame. In addition, Maywell Technology also won the bid for 12 new xPU-Attach designs, plus the previously announced large-scale AI chip project of Facebook's parent company Meta Platforms (META.US), bringing the total to 13.

“Maywell Technology believes that each successful bid for a customized AI chip can bring in billions of dollars in lifecycle revenue within 1.5 to 2 years, while each winning bid for XPU Attach can contribute hundreds of millions of dollars in lifecycle revenue to a single socket within 2 to 4 years,” Lipacis wrote in a recent report to customers. The analyst set a target price of $133 for Maywell to maintain a stock rating of “outperforming the market.” As of the beginning of the US stock market on Wednesday, Maywell Technology's stock price had risen more than 9% and hovered around $76.

XPU generally refers to a “highly scalable” processor architecture. It usually refers to AI ASICs (including TPUs), FPGAs, and other customized AI accelerator hardware other than Nvidia AI GPUs.

Maywell causes AI ASIC storm

Joseph Moore, a well-known analyst from Wall Street financial giant Morgan Stanley, also took a positive view of Maywell Technology's AI campaign, pointing out that the company raised its financial targets beyond expectations, and gave “significant positive comments” on “long-term new growth opportunities in the AI field.”

“These numbers are as ambitious as Nvidia's performance outlook back then. However, we would prefer to see their recent performance significantly exceed expectations rather than raise their 2028 target. But it is undeniable that the significant growth opportunities for Maywell AI ASIC are real, and the stock price will react aggressively.” Analyst Moore wrote.

Daimo analyst Moore maintains the “same as the market” rating for Maywell Technology stock. Key points summarized in the analyst's research report include:

The data center customized chip TAM (potential market size) was raised sharply to US$94 billion, a 26% increase over last year's AI activity;

Maywell Technology plans to win at least 20% of the market share, of which more than 50% of the data center business revenue will come from AI computing power requirements related to “customized AI chips”, that is, AI ASICs;

Added two large XPU Compute projects and four XPU Attach Sockets;

The total potential revenue scale of the customized silicon product pipeline for all of the company's projects is 75 billion US dollars;

The Maia customized AI chip project with Microsoft (MSFT.US) is progressing in line with the plan;

At least one XPU attachment socket will work with AWS's Trainium3 AI processor, the cloud computing business unit under Amazon (AMZN.US).

“Maywell has already caused the AI ASIC storm and is clearly in the Wall Street AI winner camp. Despite recent negative market sentiment; we maintain a 'consistent with the market' rating and still prefer Broadcom, which also belongs in the ASIC field, but it is expected that Maywell's stock price will trend upward.” Analyst Moore added.

Vivek Arya, a well-known analyst from Bank of America, pointed out that the company's 2028 earnings forecast means that the earnings potential per share can reach $8, which is 60% higher than Wall Street's estimate.

“We continue to be optimistic about Mywell: the wave of AI capital expenditure expansion by cloud computing giants will drive this data center business-focused and one of the few technology companies with leading IP covering AI computing power infrastructure, XPU, networking, electrical-photonics, security, and storage/memory to achieve fundamental upward potential,” Arya wrote in the research report.

Arya reiterated Bank of America's “buy” rating of Maywell Technology and raised the target price from $80 to $90, saying that the AI campaign and product pipeline and performance forecast updates “may make investors more at ease and help the stock price catch up with its AI chip peers, especially considering that Maywell's NTM PE of only 23x is currently below the historical median value of 32x, and far below most chip peers.”

The biggest beneficiary isn't Mywell, but Broadcom?

Since this year, especially with the advent of the DeepSeek-R1 model that shocked Silicon Valley and Wall Street, it can be said that the bull market narrative about AI ASICs has been continuously strengthened, but as Morgan Stanley said, from a long-term investment perspective, it is likely that Broadcom will benefit the most from Maywell Technology's AI event in the long term.

Broadcom is one of the core chip suppliers for Apple and other major technology companies. It is also the core supplier of Ethernet switch chips for the world's largest AI data centers, as well as AI ASIC, a customized AI chip that is essential for AI training/inference. As far as the AI ASIC (non-GPU) segment of cloud computing vendors is concerned, Broadcom is currently the absolute “hegemon”, with a market share of about 60%; followed by Maywell in the 13% to 15% range. The remaining vendors include Global Unichip, Alchip (Shixin), and Samsung LSI to share the remaining share.

Broadcom's strong performance and optimistic performance outlook for multiple quarters, the strongest power in the AI ASIC field tells investors that under the “extremely low-cost AI big model computing power paradigm” led by DeepSeek, demand for AI computing power is still exploding, and the so-called “excess AI computing power” is a source of market concern. In particular, as DeepSeek completely sets off an “efficiency revolution” at the level of AI training and inference, and pushes future AI model development to focus on “low cost” and “high performance,” AI ASICs are entering a stronger demand expansion trajectory than the 2023-2024 AI boom period against the backdrop of a sharp increase in demand for AI inference in the cloud. In the future, major customers such as Google, OpenAI, and Meta are expected to continue to invest heavily in developing AI ASIC chips with Broadcom.

With absolute technological leadership in the field of inter-chip interconnection communication and high-speed data transmission between chips, in recent years, Broadcom is currently the most important participant in ASIC customized chips in the AI field. For example, Google's self-developed server AI chip - TPU AI accelerator chip. Broadcom is the core participant. Broadcom and the Google team are participating in the development of TPU AI acceleration chips. In addition to chip design, Broadcom also provided Google with key intellectual property rights for inter-chip interconnection communication, and was responsible for manufacturing, testing, and packaging new chips, thus protecting Google's expansion of new AI data centers.

As US tech giants insist on investing heavily in the field of artificial intelligence, AI ASIC giants, such as Broadcom, Mywell Technology, and Shixin from Taiwan, China may be the winners the most. Microsoft, Amazon, Google, Meta, and even generative AI leader OpenAI are all teaming up with Broadcom or other ASCI giants to update iterative AI ASIC chips for massive inference side AI computing power deployment. Therefore, the future market share expansion trend of AI ASICs is expected to be significantly stronger than AI GPUs, and will tend to have equal shares, rather than the current situation where AI GPUs are alone — accounting for up to 90% of the AI chip field. The four major US tech giants are expected to spend as much as 330 billion US dollars on AI computing power in 2026, which means they are expected to increase by nearly 10% from the record scale this year.