A note on scope: chip architecture isn’t my research area. This is a synthesis of public reporting on a trend worth understanding, written with the same care about sourcing and overclaiming I try to apply to my own work.
In about 18 months, nearly every major AI lab and cloud provider has quietly become a chip company. Broadcom, now co-designing custom silicon with Google, Meta, and OpenAI, among others, is carrying a $73 billion AI backlog and telling investors it expects more than $100 billion in annual AI chip revenue by 2027. Amazon’s in-house silicon business, built to run in its own data centers rather than sold to others, is already generating revenue at a $20 billion annual run rate. Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and Meta combined are on track to spend roughly $725 billion on capital expenditure in 2026, a 77 percent jump from the year before, with a growing share of that aimed at infrastructure that isn’t a Nvidia GPU.