By Geoffrey Seiler
Publication Date: 2026-02-24 20:10:00
Broadcom looks poised to become a big inference winner in 2026.
The artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure market is booming, with five of the largest hyperscalers (owners of massive data centers) alone set to spend an eye-popping $700 billion in 2026. To put that in perspective, that exceeds the gross domestic product (GDP) of all but 24 countries.
Right now, this spending is being done for two main purposes. The first is to train large language models (LLMs), such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Anthropic’s Claude, and Alphabet‘s Gemini. The other is to support AI inference, which then deploys the models to answer queries.
Image source: Getty Images.
Nvidia (NVDA +0.57%) is the clear leader in AI model training, and it has established a wide moat in this area through its CUDA software platform, which is where most foundational AI code has been written and optimized for its graphics processing units (GPUs). However, the company is also the leader in inference. Its Blackwell GB300…