Half of understanding the AI supply chain is decoding the vocabulary, and the most precise place to find a company's own definitions is often the proxy statement, where the business gets described for shareholders. Broadcom (AVGO) lays out its AI-silicon terms there.
In its 2026 proxy statement on Schedule 14A filed March 2, 2026, Broadcom describes its offerings as including, but not limited to, custom AI accelerators, XPUs, ASICs, networking and connectivity solutions, and AI racks or systems based on its XPUs. The filing was surfaced through EdgarBeast, the SEC filing data API and evidence index, and the enumeration is quoted from the document.
Walk the anatomy. An ASIC - application-specific integrated circuit - is silicon hardwired for one job rather than general-purpose compute. An XPU, in Broadcom's usage, is a custom AI accelerator of exactly that kind: a chip co-designed with a hyperscaler to run that customer's models efficiently, as opposed to a merchant GPU sold to everyone. The proxy treats 'XPU' and 'custom AI accelerator' as the same category.
The phrase 'AI racks or systems based on its XPUs' extends the picture upward. Broadcom is describing not just selling a chip but the networking and the rack-scale system that wires many XPUs together - the connectivity layer being as essential to a cluster as the accelerators themselves. That is why networking and connectivity sit in the same list as the silicon.
For readers building a mental model of who makes what in AI infrastructure, the proxy's glossary is a clean primary source: the terms are Broadcom's own, in a signed filing. Read the offerings list in the DEF 14A directly rather than inferring the vocabulary from secondary coverage.