Broadcom Built Openai’s First Chip In Record Time, But The Money Went Elsewhere

What Happened

Broadcom (AVGO) and OpenAI have unveiled Jalapeño, OpenAI’s first custom AI chip, and the launch gives the Broadcom-OpenAI partnership a central seat in the AI infrastructure race.

Yet positioning data tells a more cautious story, because money flow and relative strength show large investors quietly favoring rivals like Micron and AMD, even as the headlines belong to Broadcom.

Broadcom CEO Hock Tan said that the launch “validates very well the business model” that every “model maker” and “frontier model developer” will eventually design and build their own silicon, simply because “they can do it much better.”

Market Context

That said, not every corner of the market is selling Broadcom.

Wall Street is firmer. Every recent analyst action on the stock is a Buy. JPMorgan’s Harlan Sur lifted his broadcom stock price target to $580 from $500, while Oppenheimer sits at $535 and UBS at $485. The stock trades near $390 and is up roughly 10% this year.

Why It Matters

The reason sits in the flow data. Chaikin Money Flow (CMF), a proxy for institutional buying and selling pressure, reads -0.006 for AVGO. A negative number signals distribution, meaning more money is leaving the stock than entering it.

The contrast with peers is the real tell. CMF reads +0.169 for AMD and +0.076 for Micron (MU), both firmly in accumulation. The Micron stock might be getting all the post-earnings beat attention.

The position is small, spread across just two wallets, so the conviction is thin. The same desks are heavily net short Nvidia (NVDA) by about $14 million, which suggests they may see Broadcom as the better near-term bet within the group.

Details

Jalapeño Validates Broadcom’s Whole AI Strategy

OpenAI designed Jalapeño from scratch for large-language-model inference, and Broadcom built it. The chip went from design to manufacturing tape-out in just nine months, which the companies call the fastest such cycle ever in advanced semiconductors. OpenAI’s own models helped speed up the design.

That speed matters because it proves the bet Broadcom has made in its AI business. Broadcom does not sell ready-made AI chips like Nvidia (NVDA). Instead, it co-designs custom chips, known as ASICs, for a single customer and earns design and manufacturing fees.

Jalapeño shows that the model can deliver a frontier chip fast. Every major AI lab now has a reason to design its own chip with Broadcom rather than only buy Nvidia GPUs.

The numbers behind it are large. Early testing shows performance per watt “substantially better” than the current state of the art, and the platform is set for gigawatt-scale deployment with Microsoft and other partners starting late 2026.

So the catalyst is real, and the Broadcom stock narrative is strong. The flow data, however, does not fully agree.

Money Flow Favors Micron and AMD, Not Broadcom

Despite the headline, AVGO is lagging its own sector. Its relative strength, measured against the chip benchmark SOXX at 100, is 53.6, so the stock is underperforming the group even on its big news day.

Big money is rotating into the chipmakers tied to the memory and GPU build-out, not into Broadcom.

This happens because the Jalapeño win is a long-dated story. Deployment starts in late 2026, so traders chasing nearer-term momentum are parking cash elsewhere.

Perp Traders and Analysts Stay Bullish on Broadcom Stock

On Nansen, smart-money perpetual traders are net long AVGO by roughly $165,000, with longs outweighing shorts by more than 5-to-1.

The split is clean. The Jalapeño chip and unanimous Buy ratings point up, while AVGO’s negative Chaikin Money Flow of -0.006 and its 53.6 relative strength against SOXX flash the warning. A flip in institutional money flow back above zero is what tips Broadcom back to bullish.

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