Over the past several weeks, investors have been bombarded with a wave of updates as companies reported earnings results for the second calendar quarter. For technology investors, artificial intelligence (AI) remains the dominant theme fueling the sector higher.

As I write this (mid-day on Aug. 27), all of the “Magnificent Seven” have posted earnings — with the lone exception being Nvidia (NVDA -3.38%), which reports later today. Still, the breadcrumbs left by big tech point to an undeniable trend: Spending on AI infrastructure is accelerating.

While this is undeniably bullish for graphics processing unit (GPU) leaders like Nvidia and Advanced Micro Devices, it also creates a powerful tailwind for systems integration specialist Broadcom (AVGO -3.70%).

With Broadcom slated to report earnings on Sept. 4, I predict the stock is well-positioned to rally.

Let’s explore why I’m optimistic about Broadcom’s upcoming earnings report, and assess whether the stock is a compelling buy at current levels.

Follow big tech’s breadcrumbs

Global hyperscalers such as Amazon, Alphabet, Microsoft, and Meta Platforms have been spending record sums on capital expenditures (capex) over the last few years. While this clearly bodes well for Nvidia and AMD, Broadcom has also been a quiet beneficiary of rising AI infrastructure investment.

Data by YCharts.

One of Broadcom’s key AI growth drivers comes from its application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs) business. These custom silicon solutions allow customers to design chips that are optimized for their unique workloads.

By integrating purpose-built performance with compute power efficiency, Broadcom’s ASICs help hyperscalers lower their total cost of infrastructure relative to relying solely on off-the-shelf accelerators from the likes of Nvidia. This becomes highly desirable as training and inferencing workloads scale and become increasingly complex as more sophisticated AI use cases unfold.

Broadcom’s networking division is also positioned to benefit materially from the ongoing AI infrastructure cycle. As big tech continues to pour hundreds of billions of dollars annually into GPU deployment, Broadcom’s supporting infrastructure becomes an indispensable unsung hero.

The company’s portfolio of high-performance switches, interconnects, and optical components delivers low-latency, high-bandwidth connectivity to keep next-generation accelerators running at full speed. In essence, the company’s networking gear represents a foundational layer of AI data center construction — ensuring scalability and efficiency as workloads expand.

Image source: Getty Images.

Management likes the stock — shouldn’t you?

With a forward price-to-earnings (P/E) multiple of 45, Broadcom certainly isn’t trading at a discount. In fact, its multiple sits near peak levels seen during the AI revolution.

Data by YCharts.

Even so, the company’s board of directors authorized a $10 billion stock buyback program back in April. Share buybacks at elevated valuations can point to a strong signal: Management remains confident in Broadcom’s long-term growth trajectory, underscored by ongoing hyperscaler investment. On a more subtle note, sometimes companies repurchase their own shares when management thinks the stock is undervalued.

These dynamics could suggest that Broadcom is positioned for sustained, robust earnings growth, which could fuel further valuation expansion — even in the face of a premium multiple.

Is Broadcom stock a buy right now?

For the last few years, the AI trade has largely surrounded Nvidia and the cloud hyperscalers. Yet as infrastructure spending accelerates, the scope of the AI opportunity is broadening to other mission-critical enablers such as Broadcom. Custom chips, high-performance networking equipment, and integrated systems are now just as essential as securing GPUs — and Broadcom sits squarely at this intersection.

In my eyes, Broadcom is approaching its own “Nvidia moment” — a potential inflection where the narrative begins to recognize Broadcom as a supporting pillar of AI infrastructure and not simply an ancillary beneficiary of these tailwinds.

Against this backdrop, I predict that Broadcom’s September earnings report will reinforce its strategic importance in the AI landscape — fueling investor enthusiasm and a further rerating of the stock. For these reasons, I see Broadcom as a compelling opportunity to buy and hold over a long-term time horizon.

Forget fantasy football, this is fantasy machine learning.

People are placing their bets on markets like Kalshi, where they can trade on the outcome of real-world events, everything from when Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce will wed to whether Google will break up and, of course, the AI model race. Kalshi saw 10 times the volume on AI trades compared with the start of the year, according to The Wall Street Journal.

“Kalshi’s markets are extremely efficient and serve as a source of truth on the likelihood of all events, including AI model progress,” Jack Such, a spokesperson for the company, told PYMNTS.

So who’s winning based on the bets?

“Gemini is the current market leader for ‘Best AI’ by the end of 2025,” Such said.

On Kalshi, Gemini shows a 58% probability of winning, compared with 19% for ChatGPT, as of midmorning on Thursday (Aug. 28). The third spot goes to Grok, at 17%. Claude, which Menlo Ventures said was the enterprise favorite, clocks in at 2% and tied with Meta’s Llama.

The total trading volume reached $8.1 million.

Kalshi is just one of several platforms that are pivoting to AI trading.

Other players include Polymarket, an offshore crypto-based prediction market, Manifold Markets, Metaculus and other sites.

Which AI model is winning globally? The AI community abroad agrees with the Americans. Polymarket, which is only available to non-Americans, predicts that Google will win by year’s end, at 66% odds. OpenAI comes in at 16% probability while xAI is third with 14%.

See also: Crypto Firms Grapple with Bank-Like Risks, Without the Regulation

Betting on Anything in the World

How Kalshi works: People bet yes or no on outcomes in the real world, such as whether the Fed will cut short-term interest rates by 25 basis points in September (76% probability it will) or who will win the Nobel Peace Prize (Yulia Navalnaya, widow of Russian opposition leader Alexei, is at 20% probability and Donald Trump at 10%).

Bettors buy contracts tied to these outcomes at prices between a penny and 99 cents, settling at $1. For example, if a bettor buys a contract for 40 cents and they guess the outcome correctly, they are paid $1. If they guessed wrong, they lose their 40 cents. Bettors can also sell the contract before there’s an outcome if they see the contract price go up or down.

In a tie, the default would be a negative outcome.

For AI models, results will be determined by the rankings on the LMSYS Chatbot Arena Leaderboard at the end of the year, according to Kalshi.

Currently, the leaderboard shows Gemini 2.5 pro slightly ahead of GPT-5 for first place, followed closely by Claude Opus.

One Kalshi user noticed a tie earlier this month and wrote, “it’s a tight race on LMArena. I don’t understand why the spread is so drastic. Huge earnings for people who bet on GPT with decent odds that it will flip.”

Kalshi began allowing bettors to trade on AI models in 2023. “We were confident in consumer demand for these products because of the rapid growth of AI and the economic and political consequences of model progress,” Such said.

Kalshi said the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission regulates it as a financial exchange for trading futures, swaps and options on commodities.

“Understanding that Kalshi is regulated … helps reassure users that they are engaging with a platform that adheres to the highest standards of operation and accountability,” the company says on its site.

Here’s to hoping the bet will be good.

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TORONTO — As the rapid, unregulated development of artificial intelligence continues, the language people in Silicon Valley use to describe it is becoming increasingly religious.

From predicting the potential destruction of humanity to a transhumanist apocalypse where people merge with AI, here’s what some of the key players are saying.

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“I think religion will be in trouble if we create other beings. Once we start creating beings that can think for themselves and do things for themselves, maybe even have bodies if they’re robots, we may start realizing we’re less special than we thought. And the idea that we’re very special and we were made in the image of God, that idea may go out the window.”

— Nobel Prize winner Geoffrey Hinton, often dubbed the “Godfather of AI” for his pioneering work on deep learning and neural networks.

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“By 2045, which is only 20 years from now, we’ll be a million times more powerful. And we’ll be able to have expertise in every field.”

— author and computer scientist Ray Kurzweil, who believes humans will merge with AI.

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“There certainly are dimensions of the technology that have become extremely powerful in the last century or two that have an apocalyptic dimension. And perhaps it’s strange not to try to relate it to the biblical tradition.”

— PayPal and Palantir co-founder Peter Thiel speaking to the Hoover Institution at Stanford University.

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“I feel that the four big AI CEOs in the U.S. are modern-day prophets with four different versions of the Gospel and they’re all telling the same basic story that this is so dangerous and so scary that I have to do it and nobody else.”

— Max Tegmark, a physicist and machine learning researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

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“When people in the tech industry talk about building this one true AI, it’s almost as if they think they’re creating God or something.”

— Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg on a podcast promoting his company’s own venture into AI.

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“Everyone (including AI companies!) will need to do their part both to prevent risks and to fully realize the benefits. But it is a world worth fighting for. If all of this really does happen over 5 to 10 years — the defeat of most diseases, the growth in biological and cognitive freedom, the lifting of billions of people out of poverty to share in the new technologies, a renaissance of liberal democracy and human rights — I suspect everyone watching it will be surprised by the effect it has on them.”

— Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei in his essay, “Machines of Loving Grace: How AI Could Transform the World for the Better.”

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“You and I are living through this once-in-human-history transition where humans go from being the smartest thing on planet Earth to not the smartest thing on planet Earth.”

— OpenAI CEO Sam Altman during an interview for TED Talks.

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“These really big, scary problems that are complex and challenging to address — it’s so easy to gravitate towards fantastical thinking and wanting a one-size-fits-all global solution. I think it’s the reason that so many people turn to cults and all sorts of really out there beliefs when the future feels scary and uncertain. I think this is not different than that. They just have billions of dollars to actually enact their ideas.”

— Dylan Baker, lead research engineer at the Distributed AI Research Institute.