Broadcom’s massive rally after last week’s earnings report is reminiscent of when Nvidia shares first started to take off back in 2023. The chip maker now needs to prove it can follow through to become another giant of the artificial intelligence era.

Broadcom shares have soared 38% in the two trading days since it reported results, pushing the company’s market capitalisation to nearly US$1.2-trillion. At the heart of the rally is Broadcom’s prediction that the addressable market for AI components it designs for data centre operators will be as big as $90-billion by fiscal 2027. But there’s a lot to be done to turn that opportunity into reality.

“This is kind of like the Nvidia moment of maybe a year-and-a-half ago where they blew the number out and everybody had to catch up and chase it,” said Ken Mahoney, CEO at Mahoney Asset Management, which owns the stock. Broadcom is showing investors that the demands from AI computing are so big that there’s plenty of room for other winners aside from Nvidia, Mahoney said.

Broadcom was having a strong year even before last week’s results, with solid growth in its AI business underpinning its performance as one of the top stocks in the Philadelphia Semiconductor Index. Still, it hasn’t been a completely smooth ride: the shares plunged in September after the company gave a disappointing forecast because of weakness in its non-AI operations.

This quarter’s results have turned the focus squarely back to AI. Broadcom shares are now up more than 120% year to date, set for the best annual performance since their 2009 listing. Analysts have been scrambling to keep up, with multiple Wall Street firms hiking price targets and estimates following the earnings. Still, even a 19% jump in the average analyst target since the results has failed to keep pace with the shares.

This trajectory has inevitably spurred comparisons with Nvidia, the stock market’s original AI winner. Nvidia followed its blowout earnings report in May 2023 with a series of estimate-beating results and quarterly forecasts. It has also defied sceptics who said 2024 would be tough for the shares. Nvidia is up about 167% this year but has pulled back in the past two days — possibly because investors are considering the prospect of rising competition from Broadcom.

Parallells

“I see a lot of parallels between Broadcom and Nvidia,” said Joe Tigay, portfolio manager of the Rational Equity Armor Fund, who sees reason to believe Broadcom’s stock can show sustainable gains in the same way as Nvidia. “Obviously Broadcom still needs to deliver to justify a 38x multiple, but it has shown good growth and execution this year.”

Read: Nvidia forecast disappoints even as sales soar

That multiple — the price investors have to pay for shares relative to earnings projected over the next 12 months — is pushing deeper into record territory. That may suggest Broadcom has limited room for error, though Nvidia has set a bullish precedent for investors wanting to jump onto the next big potential AI winner. Nvidia’s profits grew so fast last year that the valuation actually got cheaper as the stock rose, because estimates were being raised at an even faster clip.

Estimates for Broadcom’s net earnings per share for fiscal 2025 have risen 12% in the past week.

Still, not every “Nvidia moment” has turned into a sustained gain, with some companies failing to live up to expectations or seeing share price rallies stall. ARM Holdings gave a bullish forecast in February, and said it was “only at the beginning” of the AI boom. That sparked a 93% surge in the stock over the next three sessions, but the shares haven’t progressed much since then and are now down more than 20% from a July peak.

“It is too soon to say whether we’re going to see a series of blowout reports like we’ve gotten from Nvidia,” said Alec Young, chief investment strategist at Mapsignals. “Broadcom has done a really good job, but these things don’t always end well.” — Ryan Vlastelica and Carmen Reinicke, (c) 2024 Bloomberg LP

Get breaking news from TechCentral on WhatsApp. Sign up here