According to JP Morgan analysts, Facebook parent Meta Platforms Inc would employ Broadcom Inc’s custom chips to develop its metaverse hardware, becoming the chipmaker’s second billion-dollar ASIC customer.
Broadcom’s ASIC (application-specific integrated circuit) chips will generate $2 billion to $2.5 billion in revenue this year, according to analysts, thanks to deals with Meta and partnerships with Alphabet and Microsoft.
About the Billion-Dollar Customer
Analyst Harlan Sur said: “We believe these wins are primarily at 5 nanometre and 3 nanometre and will be used to power Meta’s metaverse hardware architecture that it will deploy over the next few years.”
Meta is heavily investing in the metaverse, a virtual area where people communicate, work, and play, by adding new capabilities to hardware devices that serve as virtual world access points.
Sur added that, after Google, Meta will become Broadcom’s second $1 billion-a-year ASIC customer in the next three to four years. ASICs are meant to efficiently perform hyper-specific tasks, such as AI and machine learning.
Meta and Broadcom
Since 2016, Broadcom and Google have collaborated on a bespoke processor for machine learning tasks, which the brokerage predicts will be worth over $1.3 billion in 2022.
Meta is working on a variety of metaverse hardware, such as smart glasses and virtual reality headsets, and has even opened its first physical store where customers can try out these and other gadgets. Sur also stated that the near-term ASIC program pipeline is good, as Broadcom is expected to ramp Meta/Facebook and Microsoft ASICs this year.
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