When investors think about the companies that won the AI boom, one name tends to dominate the conversation.
But the infrastructure buildout that followed quietly created a second wave of semiconductor winners in which some companies that didn’t write a single line of AI code found themselves at the center of every AI chip ever designed or deployed.
Arm Holdings and Broadcom are two of the clearest examples: one owns the blueprint behind almost every AI chip in existence, while the other has become the custom silicon partner of choice for the world’s most powerful technology companies.
BTSE recognizes both as defining AI infrastructure plays and recently listed ARM-PERP and AVGO-PERP as stock perpetual futures, bringing two of the most consequential AI trade stories of 2026 into the crypto-native world.
Palantir, AMD, and Netflix had already landed on BTSE as tech perps for the modern portfolio — and ARM and Broadcom are taking that catalog to a new level.
How Arm Holdings Became the Blueprint Behind Every AI Chip
Ticker: ARM-PERP
Market Cap: ~$366B
YTD Performance: +268% (as of early June 2026)
Arm Holdings doesn’t manufacture chips. What it does is more powerful: it designs the computing architecture — the foundational blueprint that other chipmakers license to build their own processors.
Every time a chip based on Arm’s design gets manufactured and shipped anywhere in the world, Arm collects a royalty. That model, which once seemed like a quiet corner of the semiconductor industry, has turned into one of the most structurally leveraged positions in the entire AI boom.
The reason is simple. Almost every major AI chip being built today, whether it is powering a smartphone, running inference in a hyperscaler data center, or processing AI workloads at the edge, is built on Arm’s architecture.
Apple’s custom silicon, Nvidia’s new AI PC chips, and a growing roster of data center processors all carry Arm’s DNA. That means every dollar the industry spends building AI hardware translates, in some form, into royalty revenue for Arm. The more the AI buildout accelerated, the more Arm’s financials reflected it.
The migration from ARM’s older Armv8 architecture to its newer Armv9 platform became a major financial catalyst. Armv9 commands roughly double the royalty rate of its predecessor, and the explosion of AI workloads is accelerating that transition faster than most analysts had anticipated.
Data center royalty revenue more than doubled year over year, full-year revenue hit a record $4.92 billion in fiscal 2026, and Q4 FY2026 alone delivered $1.49 billion, with its third consecutive year of showing more than 20% growth since its 2023 IPO.
The market took notice. CEO Rene Haas said he was “very confident” the company would hit its $15 billion AI chip revenue target ahead of schedule, citing overwhelming demand from data center and AI services builders.
For traders watching the AI infrastructure story unfold, Arm is no longer a supporting character — it is structural to the entire narrative.
Why Broadcom Became the Hyperscalers’ Custom AI Chip Partner
Ticker: AVGO-PERP
Market Cap: ~$1.87T
YTD Performance: +22%
Broadcom occupies a different but equally critical position in the AI boom.
Where Arm licenses architecture, Broadcom designs and delivers custom silicon, purpose-built AI accelerators known as XPUs, for the world’s largest technology companies. The distinction matters because it explains exactly why Broadcom became so central to the AI buildout and why its growth trajectory became one of the most compelling in the semiconductor sector.
Hyperscalers like Google, Meta, Anthropic, and OpenAI faced a strategic problem as AI capital expenditure scaled into the hundreds of billions: they didn’t want to be entirely dependent on off-the-shelf chips from a single supplier. Building their own custom AI accelerators gave them efficiency, cost control, and competitive independence at scale, and Broadcom was the company they turned to to make that happen.
CEO Hock Tan confirmed on Broadcom’s Q2 2026 earnings call that the company served six core custom chip customers, including Anthropic, Google, Meta, and OpenAI. Broadcom effectively became the picks-and-shovels play on hyperscaler AI capital expenditure: as those companies poured money into AI infrastructure, a significant and growing share of that spending landed directly on Broadcom’s order books.
The financial results reflected the scale of that relationship. Broadcom’s AI revenue reached $10.8 billion in Q2 2026, more than doubling on an annual basis, driven by its custom AI chips and the high-speed networking infrastructure required to connect them inside data centers.
Tan reiterated the company’s guidance for more than $100 billion in AI semiconductor revenue in fiscal 2027 — a figure that, even in the context of the broader AI boom, stood out as a statement of just how deeply Broadcom had embedded itself in hyperscaler infrastructure planning.
Broadcom’s market cap stood at approximately $1.87 trillion as of early June 2026, making it one of only a handful of semiconductor companies in history to cross the trillion-dollar threshold — a milestone reached entirely on the back of the AI cycle.
For traders looking to express a view on the hyperscaler AI buildout without picking a single customer, Broadcom offered exactly that exposure.
What Stock Perpetual Futures Mean for Crypto Traders
A stock perpetual futures contract — or stock perp — is a derivative, meaning a financial instrument whose value tracks the price of an underlying asset, in this case a stock.
Unlike buying shares through a traditional brokerage, a stock perp does not give the holder ownership of the underlying company. Instead, it lets traders take a long position (betting the price rises) or a short position (betting it falls) without the contract ever expiring, as long as sufficient margin is maintained.
On BTSE, stock perps trade 24 hours a day, seven days a week, with leverage of up to 50x available. Maker fees start at 0.02% and taker fees at 0.055%, with funding settled every eight hours to keep the contract price anchored to the real-world stock price. The full mechanics are covered in BTSE’s stock perps FAQ, and collateral can be managed across positions using the unified futures wallet.
The appeal for crypto-native traders extends beyond mechanics. Traditional stock markets close at 4 PM Eastern Time and stay shut on weekends, which means a major AI industry announcement or earnings release outside those hours could move a stock significantly before a retail investor could react.
Stock perps eliminate that constraint. Even the New York Stock Exchange is reportedly developing a 24/7 tokenized stock platform using blockchain and instant settlement, confirming that around-the-clock markets are rapidly becoming the new standard.
Don’t Watch the AI Boom From the Sidelines
The AI boom already minted its first generation of winners, and Arm Holdings and Broadcom proved the trade ran far deeper than any single headline name.
Arm collects royalties on every AI chip the industry builds. Broadcom designs the custom silicon that the world’s most powerful technology companies rely on to build their AI infrastructure.
Both delivered market-moving returns in 2026, and both are now accessible to every crypto trader through BTSE’s stock perpetual futures marketplace.
ARM-PERP and AVGO-PERP joined a growing catalog of AI and tech names on markets. For traders building a broader AI-focused strategy, the 2026 institutional crypto watchlist offered further context on which AI-linked assets were drawing serious institutional attention this year.
The AI wave doesn’t wait for the market to open.
Create your account today and trade ARM-PERP, AVGO-PERP, and the full AI infrastructure story on your own terms — 24 hours a day, seven days a week, with the speed and flexibility that only crypto-native trading can offer.
