New York, May 18, 2026, 12:59 EDT
- UBS bumped its price target on Broadcom to $490 from $475 on Monday, adding to a series of analyst hikes ahead of the chipmaker’s quarterly report.
- Broadcom is set to release its fiscal Q2 results on June 3. Investors want to see if custom AI chip demand is enough to back up the big run-up in the shares.
- Shares traded lower, off 1.6% around midday at $418.45. Market cap was roughly $2.03 trillion.
Broadcom got another price-target bump from Wall Street on Monday. Investors shrugged off a recent dip in the stock, focusing instead on the June earnings report, which could prove important for one of the biggest AI plays in the market.
UBS analyst Timothy Arcuri bumped Broadcom’s price target to $490 from $475 while maintaining a buy rating, TipRanks and Investing.com reported. This comes after Wells Fargo and TD Cowen also raised their targets last week, fueling ongoing debate over whether the market is still underestimating Broadcom’s custom AI chip business.
Broadcom set its fiscal Q2 earnings for after the bell on June 3, with a call at 5 p.m. ET. The company’s AI chip outlook comes back into the spotlight after a rally that’s brought the shares near highs.
Broadcom is guiding for around $22 billion in second-quarter revenue, a 47% jump from last year, and projects $10.7 billion from its AI semiconductor segment. “Our AI revenue growth is accelerating,” CEO Hock Tan told investors on the first-quarter earnings call in March. Broadcom Inc.
Broadcom was at $418.45 just before 12:45 p.m. in New York, off 1.6% for the day. The stock had hit $427.08 earlier. Shares are still well above levels from earlier in the year. According to a Motley Fool piece over the weekend, Broadcom dropped nearly 15% at the start of 2026 and has rallied almost 30% year to date.
Wells Fargo’s Aaron Rakers bumped his target on Broadcom to $545 from $430 while sticking with overweight, TheStreet said. His model links AI chip demand to data-center power and points to AI semiconductor revenue tracking 30% to 40% ahead of earlier consensus. TD Cowen analyst Joshua Buchalter raised his target too, setting it at $500 from $405 and keeping a buy rating, citing demand for TPU and networking.
TPUs, or tensor processing units, are specialized AI chips made for certain tasks, not broad graphics work. That’s the window for Broadcom as big cloud and AI players look to cut costs on model training and inference. They are still spending on networking hardware to connect chips in data centers.
More deals have come in. Broadcom agreed to build Google’s custom AI chips through 2031, according to Reuters in April. Anthropic is set to get about 3.5 gigawatts of AI compute on Google silicon starting in 2027. Meta, for its part, pushed out its Broadcom custom chip supply pact to 2029, covering several chip generations.
The competitive setup is in flux. Nvidia is still the top name in AI chips, with AMD and Marvell in the mix as data center plays. Investor’s Business Daily said last week that analysts bumped up price targets for Nvidia, AMD, and Broadcom with AI chip stocks near record levels. But on Monday, Nvidia, AMD, Marvell, and Broadcom all traded down.
Broadcom is working to keep its VMware software linked to the AI push. The company rolled out VMware Cloud Foundation 9.1, a private-cloud platform built for production AI jobs, on May 5. The new product supports AMD, Intel and Nvidia hardware. Krish Prasad, a senior vice president at Broadcom, said it targets data privacy, infrastructure cost, and agentic AI—software that handles tasks with less human input.
But there’s not much margin for error in the trade now. The Motley Fool column put Broadcom at 86 times trailing earnings, 39 times forward. Bank of America analysts listed risks like the chip cycle, customer exposure to Apple and Google, competition and roughly $60 billion in net debt, TheStreet reported.
Right now, the market isn’t questioning if Broadcom has an AI angle. It’s looking at how much of that AI story traders have already put into the shares ahead of June 3.
