Custom AI Chips Are Coming for Nvidia's Crown. Here Are 2 Companies Quietly Cashing In.

Broadcom's AI chip revenue more than doubled in its latest quarter.

Marvell expects its custom silicon business to top $10 billion in fiscal 2029.

Nvidia (NASDAQ: NVDA) still sits at the center of the artificial intelligence (AI) boom, supplying most of the chips that train and run today's largest AI models. But the biggest cloud companies are increasingly designing their own processors for some of that work, both to lean less on a single supplier and to tune the hardware to their own software.

The clearest example is Alphabet , whose Google unit has built custom chips called tensor processing units (TPUs) to run its AI services. And Google hasn't designed them entirely on its own.

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That hints at a quieter way to play this shift: the chip designers helping the cloud giants build that custom silicon. Two of them are already capturing a fast-growing slice of AI spending.

Broadcom (NASDAQ: AVGO) may be the best example of the staggering demand for custom AI chip solutions, and it may also be Nvidia's biggest competition. In Broadcom's fiscal second quarter of 2026 (the period ended May 3, 2026), revenue climbed 48% to a record $22.2 billion.

The driver was AI. Revenue tied to AI chips and networking jumped 143% to $10.8 billion, or close to half of total sales. A quarter earlier, that figure had been about $8.4 billion.