U.S. Semiconductors and Semicap Equipment: Notes from the road - takeaways from management meetings in Silicon Valley

Last week we hosted a semiconductor investor bus tour in Silicon Valley, meeting with 11 companies and management teams over a 2-day period (5 covered and 6 non-covered). Broadcom management emphasized that the custom AI accelerator opportunity is broadening well beyond Google, with demand attributed to Anthropic separate from Google's internal TPU demand, and that near-term demand appears stronger than anticipated while supply is increasingly central to converting demand into revenue. NVIDIA management pushed back strongly on the view that custom ASICs will structurally erode NVIDIA's position, arguing that the value of its platform comes from performance, fungibility and the broader CUDA ecosystem rather than the GPU alone, and noted that demand remains substantially ahead of supply. We rate AMAT, AVGO and NVDA Outperform, and INTC and NXPI Market-Perform.