Broadcom just delivered one of the biggest AI paydays of the year — and Wall Street shrugged it off anyway.

The chipmaker's fiscal third-quarter results, released after Wednesday's closing bell, showed revenue surging 86% year-over-year to $29.6 billion, topping the roughly $29.4 billion analysts had penciled in, according to CNBC's earnings coverage. Adjusted earnings came in at $3.32 a share, beating the $3.24 consensus estimate, while GAAP net income more than tripled to $13.09 billion from $4.14 billion a year earlier.

The headline number was AI: semiconductor revenue tied to artificial intelligence more than tripled to $16.7 billion, a 221% jump from a year ago that blew past the roughly $15.9 billion Wall Street had modeled, per TradingKey's breakdown of the report. Broadcom now expects full fiscal-2026 AI chip revenue of roughly $58 billion, up 186% from last year, according to the company's own quarterly financial results release.

The catch: guidance came up just short

Despite the blowout quarter, shares fell as much as 6% in extended trading before paring the drop to around 3.5%. The culprit was forward guidance: Broadcom projected fourth-quarter revenue of about $34.8 billion, representing 93% growth, but that landed just below the roughly $35 billion analysts wanted, a gap the Motley Fool flagged as the key number spooking investors. It's a familiar pattern for this AI cycle: even a genuine beat can read as a disappointment when the stock has already priced in perfection.

One soft spot beneath the AI headline: infrastructure software, the unit built around Broadcom's 2023 VMware acquisition, brought in $8.75 billion, a touch below the $8.82 billion analysts expected — a rare miss in an otherwise record-setting report.

"Q3 demand was simply hot, and we're just getting started," CEO Hock Tan told analysts on the earnings call, according to a transcript published by Investing.com.

Tan pointed to fourth-quarter AI semiconductor revenue accelerating further to roughly $21.7 billion, up 236% year-over-year, and reiterated that Broadcom sees a path to $115 billion in AI chip revenue in fiscal 2027 and $230 billion by fiscal 2028. Much of that growth is tied to custom AI accelerators the company designs for hyperscale customers including Google, Meta and OpenAI — including "Jalapeño," the custom inference chip Broadcom built with OpenAI that was unveiled earlier this year.

The results land at a jittery moment for the broader AI trade, with investors increasingly parsing every hyperscaler earnings report for signs the massive capital spending on data centers and custom silicon is paying off — or running ahead of demand. Elsewhere, a separate rundown of Wednesday's numbers zeroes in on exactly which guidance figures triggered the after-hours slide. Broadcom's next scheduled update comes when it reports fiscal fourth-quarter results in December, when the market will find out whether Tan's "just getting started" line holds up against his own numbers.