Investing.com — Here are the biggest analyst moves in the area of artificial intelligence (AI) for this week.
Macquarie upgrades Broadcom, calls it ‘cleanest listed proxy’ for Anthropic’s compute ramp
Macquarie has upgraded Broadcom to Outperform, arguing that the risk from Google bringing chip production in-house has largely played out and that the company is now the cleanest listed way to gain exposure to Anthropic’s compute buildout.
Analyst Arthur Lai said the shares’ significant pullback from their 2026 high, together with Google’s direct investment in MediaTek, showed the insourcing threat was already reflected in the price. “Broadcom is the cleanest listed proxy for Anthropic’s compute ramp,” he wrote, forecasting that Anthropic will purchase more than $40 billion from Broadcom in fiscal 2028, more than offsetting lost Google business.
Third-quarter results were in line with expectations, with revenue up 33% quarter-on-quarter to $29.6 billion. Gross profit margin slipped 2 percentage points to 75.0% as faster-growing, lower-margin AI semiconductor revenue outpaced software, while net profit beat Macquarie’s estimate by 4%.
Lai also pointed to a broader customer base as reducing risk. “Growth now rests more evenly on six XPU customers,” he wrote, noting management expects OpenAI to become the second-largest XPU customer by fiscal 2028 and Meta to ship three generations of its MTIA chip.
Macquarie raised its fiscal 2028 earnings estimate by 12% and lifted its price target 12% to $490, implying total shareholder return of about 35%.
“Broadcom dominates the rapid-growth AI ASIC market and SerDes/IP moat secures long-term edge in custom silicon, while its software business adds margin resilience and recurring visibility,” Lai wrote.
Nvidia remains ‘one of top large-cap ideas’: Baird
Earlier this week, brokerage firm Baird has reiterated an Outperform rating on Nvidia, highlighting it as “one of our top large-cap ideas” as demand for agentic AI drives a fresh wave of revenue growth.
Nvidia’s fiscal 2028 revenue guidance implies growth of about 70% year-over-year — roughly 12 times fiscal 2024 levels — reflecting a supply-constrained outlook driven largely by enterprises building GPU clusters to power proprietary AI agents. Nvidia expects hyperscaler capex to rise about 65% in calendar 2027, with cloud industry backlog now exceeding $2 trillion and hyperscaler AI spending expected to climb to $1.3 trillion in calendar 2027.
Baird highlighted Nvidia’s nearly $50 billion in investments in frontier AI labs, which it said are “working capital limited, not customer nor technology limited.” OpenAI has committed 12 gigawatts of cumulative capacity with Nvidia, including a recently announced agreement supporting an initial 4.25 gigawatts, with the first site expected online in late 2028 or early 2029.
Agreements using Nvidia’s balance sheet leverage with AI labs are expected to make up 25% of demand next year, with visibility into their profitability potentially representing “the needed impetus for multiple expansion in Nvidia’s stock.”
Competition-wise, analysts said rival custom AI chips are typically built for a single cloud or service, while Nvidia’s GPUs span the full AI life cycle across clouds, and that many customers’ custom ASIC plans have shown performance well below Nvidia’s own.
“Nvidia remains one of our top large-cap idea owing to market leadership, share gains in inferencing, platform solutions positioning Nvidia as AI leader to regional AI native clouds, overall AI industry CAGR, and the lowest P/E within the AI super-compute space,” they concluded.
iPhone launch to be likely negative catalyst for Apple stock, analyst says
KeyBanc has reiterated an Underweight rating and $250 price target on Apple, with analyst Brandon Nispel arguing the September 9 iPhone launch event is likely to be a negative catalyst as investors learn the key unknown, pricing, with neither scenario holding positive implications.
Nispel sees two outcomes: a larger price increase that softens gross margin pressure but risks denting unit volumes and causing “sticker shock,” or more selective price hikes that amplify focus on gross margins and raise the prospect of further increases down the line.
“We don’t think either is a great outcome,” he wrote, adding that Apple’s September event is typically followed by a modest negative reaction in the shares.
GLJ calls Tesla Cybercab launch a ‘sell-the-news’ event
GLJ Research has reiterated a Sell rating and $24.86 price target on Tesla, with analyst Gordon Johnson dismissing the Cybercab launch as falling well short of what even the most sympathetic sell-side coverage had flagged as a good outcome.
Johnson said his rule for Tesla product launches is simple: “count what can be counted.” On this occasion, that amounted to 45 Cybercab registrations with the Texas DMV. There was, he noted, no deployment target, no pricing, no consumer order button, no livestream and no CEO on stage.
Attendees, described as “a curated group of Tesla-friendly creators/cultists”, took rides in a two-seater with no steering wheel or pedals inside a small geofence in Austin, then posted about it.
Johnson acknowledged the engineering progress was real. “Twenty-three months ago, in Burbank, the same car was a prop on a soundstage,” he wrote, adding that the gap between then and now “is real engineering and we do not wave it away.” But he argued the stock is not priced for a car — it is priced for a network — “and on the network the company told us nothing it had not already said.”
The deeper problem, Johnson said, is that Tesla came in under the low end of what its most sympathetic sell-side coverage had set out in writing. Morgan Stanley’s September 2 note had said five to ten Cybercabs would read as “a handful” and that 25 to 50 across Texas would likely push shares higher, with the bull case being paid, unsupervised rides across Austin, Houston and Dallas.
“What we got was one city, an undisclosed subset of 45 registered cars, and an app that as of Thursday night would not let you ask for one,” Johnson wrote.
“Sell-the-news,” he concluded.
Piper Sandler upgrades Tempus AI to Overweight
Meanwhile, Piper Sandler has upgraded Tempus AI to Overweight from Neutral, raising its price target to $76 from $56, saying three growth drivers that were previously difficult to underwrite are now increasingly visible.
Analyst David Westenberg said his prior Neutral rating reflected a valuation driven more by AI sentiment than by the performance of Tempus’s diagnostics and data businesses.
He now sees a clearer fundamental case resting on three catalysts: the pending acquisition of Personalis, which gives Tempus ownership of a differentiated tumor-informed MRD platform; the positive INTerpath-001 readout, which increases the strategic value of Personalis and Tempus as the tumor sequencing provider for a potentially new therapeutic class; and FDA approval of the tumor-only xT CDx, which clears a key hurdle for Tempus to pursue unified ADLT pricing for xT.
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