The paper covered Meta's one-gigawatt Broadcom commitment on Thursday as the inflection point in the custom-silicon race. Day two produces the structural picture. Broadcom now holds custom-chip partnerships with three of the four frontier AI labs: Meta through 2029 at one gigawatt, OpenAI across ten gigawatts signed in October 2025, and Google on a long-term basis extended April 6. [1] Only Anthropic, which uses Google's TPUs through the Amazon and Google joint arrangement, remains outside the Broadcom tent.

The hard-news hook is not the wattage. It is the governance. Hock Tan will leave Meta's board after two years of service, a move Meta and Broadcom announced simultaneously with the deal. [2] Board seats at customer companies are the semiconductor industry's standard goodwill instrument — Jensen Huang holds none at hyperscalers for exactly this reason. A custom-silicon deal at gigawatt scale is material enough that the fiduciary conflict had to be named and resolved publicly rather than papered over.

The trifecta reshapes a market NVIDIA has dominated by dictating roadmap timing to every hyperscaler simultaneously. Broadcom's customer-specific designs — Meta's MTIA successor, OpenAI's TPU-class accelerator, Google's TPUv7 — allow three firms to decouple their capex from NVIDIA's release calendar. The monopoly was never a technical fact. It was a scheduling one. The schedule has broken.

Anthropic, the holdout, now looks like the exception proving the structural shift.

-- DAVID CHEN, Beijing