Is It Too Late to Buy Broadcom Stock?

Broadcom (NASDAQ: AVGO) has taken investors on a wild ride in 2026. After the stock fell nearly 15% to start 2026, it's now up nearly 30% year to date. However, if you move the start date of the analysis back to 2025, it's up around 90%. That's a huge gain in a short time frame, which may leave investors wondering if they've missed the boat on Broadcom's stock.

Let's take a look at what the future holds for Broadcom, and see if there's any more juice left to squeeze out of this top-performing stock.

Image source: Getty Images.

Broadcom's custom AI chip business is about to take off

From a valuation standpoint, Broadcom looks expensive. It trades for 86 times trailing earnings and 39 times forward earnings. Those are two incredibly expensive measures, no matter how you look at them. However, there's major growth coming.

The reason why the market is so bullish on Broadcom's stock is its custom artificial intelligence (AI) chips. While broad-purpose GPUs continue to be the primary computing unit utilized by AI hyperscalers, custom AI chips are becoming more popular. Custom AI chips are usually much more cost-effective than GPU-based training and inference, and companies are looking to save on hardware costs any way they can. By partnering with Broadcom to develop a custom AI chip, AI hyperscalers can tailor a computing chip to their workload to deliver maximum performance.

Alphabet (NASDAQ: GOOG) (NASDAQ: GOOGL) has already done this, and its Tensor Processing Unit (TPU) has become a major hit for the company. There are several other AI hyperscalers whose designs will enter production throughout 2026 and 2027, and that will significantly boost Broadcom's business.

By the end of 2027, Broadcom CEO Hock Tan believes custom AI chips will generate more than $100 billion in revenue for the company. The AI semiconductor division (which also has products outside of custom AI chips) generated $8.4 billion in the first quarter of fiscal year 2026, ended Feb. 1. That's major revenue growth, and Wall Street analysts are on board with this massive rise. During fiscal year 2025, Broadcom generated about $64 billion in revenue. By the end of 2027, analysts expect $159 billion in revenue.

AVGO Revenue (TTM) data by YCharts

That growth will justify Broadcom's current expensive valuation, which is why the stock trades for 24 times 2027 earnings -- a far more reasonable price tag, even if it is based on next year's projections. If Broadcom's custom AI chip business ends up being bigger than Wall Street projects, Broadcom's stock could have a lot more upside ahead. However, if it flops, the stock is in a precarious spot, because a lot of that growth has already been priced in. Broadcom is still a solid investment pick, but it's not nearly the value it was just a few months ago.

Keithen Drury has positions in Alphabet and Broadcom. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Alphabet and Broadcom. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.