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Broadcom soars as rave reviews for Gemini 3 boost appeal of its custom chips

When spectators saw Michael Jordan blossom as a basketball star, it made them want to buy Nike’s Air Jordans.

Mizuho reckons there’s a similar halo effect for Broadcom based on the rave reviews for Google’s latest GenAI model, which include this ringing endorsement from Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff.

“Gemini 3 was trained and powered on Google homegrown TPU chips, which benefits partner AVGO,” wrote Daniel O’Regan, Mizuho’s managing director of equity trading.

Custom chips (ASICs) are Broadcom’s specialty, and as O’Regan noted, Google and Broadcom codesigned these building blocks for Gemini 3. Boosts to Google’s capex budget have tended to buoy shares of Broadcom, since it’s a big beneficiary of these outlays.

The early positive reception to Gemini 3 implies that: a) Google will want to continue this relationship (and need more chips for training and inference!), and b) other GenAI developers might be more willing to pursue the custom chip route for AI models and inference, perhaps eating into market share for Nvidia’s GPU-based solutions.

To this end, Broadcom announced a collaboration with OpenAI in mid-October to develop and deploy 10 gigawatts of custom AI accelerators.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has argued that GPU-centric data center solutions are superior because of how ubiquitous the firm’s CUDA software is in high-performance computing.

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Sandisk slides on Citron short announcement

Sandisk’s roughly 1,200% run-up over the last year — it was spun off from Western Digital exactly a year ago — took a breather early Tuesday, after well-known stuff-stirrer Citron Research, short seller Andrew Left’s firm, announced it was short the stock.

In a post on X, Citron suggested that while Sandisk has benefited from the parabolic price increase for memory chips, it’s only a matter of time before giant contract chip manufacturers like Samsung Electronics and TSMC turn on the taps:

“The market is pricing SanDisk like its $NVDA. Theres one problem: NVIDIA has a moat. SanDisk sells a commodity. Weve seen this movie before 2008, 2012, 2018. Its never different this time. Memory is a cycle, and cycles peak.”

That’s true historically speaking, but Wall Street seems to see the memory price spike continuing for at least a couple more years. Analysts have ratcheted up their earnings expectations over the next few years, in line with the guidance Sandisk issued in its latest earnings report. And shorting a stock with this much momentum — it’s up more than 150% this year alone! — is treacherous indeed.

“The market is pricing SanDisk like its $NVDA. Theres one problem: NVIDIA has a moat. SanDisk sells a commodity. Weve seen this movie before 2008, 2012, 2018. Its never different this time. Memory is a cycle, and cycles peak.”

That’s true historically speaking, but Wall Street seems to see the memory price spike continuing for at least a couple more years. Analysts have ratcheted up their earnings expectations over the next few years, in line with the guidance Sandisk issued in its latest earnings report. And shorting a stock with this much momentum — it’s up more than 150% this year alone! — is treacherous indeed.

Death Struggle Software

Software companies get a glimmer of hope that they can be Anthropic customers, rather than being eaten

Anthropic’s latest announcement seems to be giving a lift to software companies the market was previously viewing as the walking disrupted.

Constellation Energy Q4 Earnings report

Top AI energy trade Constellation Energy beats earnings expectations

The company declined to give full-year 2026 guidance until a call slated for the end of March.

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