Step aside, young folks of tech. This week we hear from the industry’s, ah, elder statesmen—specifically Larry Ellison at Oracle and Hock Tan from Broadcom, whose combined age is about 150. Oracle and Broadcom are each reporting their latest quarterly earnings this week, when the status of their newish AI businesses will be in the spotlight. In the case of Oracle, we’ll be looking for an update on its AI-related cloud expansion while Broadcom will be reporting the latest numbers for its AI chip business. Both businesses, to be clear, are in their early days of expansion—at least if we believe Ellison and Tan.
Take Broadcom. Its AI-related revenue grew by more than 60% in the first three quarters of its 2025 fiscal year, and it has projected slightly faster growth in that segment...
Step aside, young folks of tech. This week we hear from the industry’s, ah, elder statesmen—specifically Larry Ellison at Oracle and Hock Tan from Broadcom, whose combined age is about 150. Oracle and Broadcom are each reporting their latest quarterly earnings this week, when the status of their newish AI businesses will be in the spotlight. In the case of Oracle, we’ll be looking for an update on its AI-related cloud expansion while Broadcom will be reporting the latest numbers for its AI chip business. Both businesses, to be clear, are in their early days of expansion—at least if we believe Ellison and Tan.
Take Broadcom. Its AI-related revenue grew by more than 60% in the first three quarters of its 2025 fiscal year, and it has projected slightly faster growth in that segment for the October quarter, which it’s reporting on Thursday. That should bring AI revenue to $19.9 billion for fiscal 2025, compared with $12.2 billion in fiscal 2024. That’s peanuts compared with Nvidia, whose AI chip business made up most of the company’s $57 billion third quarter revenue. Broadcom isn’t likely to catch up to Nvidia—well, probably ever—but it will certainly grow. Its chip customers include Google, whose AI chip business appears to be taking off. Tan last December forecast that the AI chip and networking market he is aiming at will explode to between $60 billion and $90 billion by 2027, implying that Broadcom’s business can expand enormously in the next two years. We'll be watching for updates this week. (For more on Tan, see our Weekend profile, published on Friday.)