avgo earnings ai market expectations

Step back from AVGO for a moment and look at the full picture of this earnings season. Something structural has changed, and it matters for how you position the next six months.
The companies that got rewarded this cycle — Snowflake (+36%), Dell (+40%), PANW (+10%) — all shared one characteristic: they delivered results that were genuinely surprising relative to lowered expectations. SNOW had been left for dead. DELL's AI server revenue growing 757% was not in anyone's model. PANW was recovering from sector-wide trauma.
The companies that got punished — ZS (−30%), CRM (flat), AVGO (−6–15%) — were priced for perfection going in. ZS was expected to perform. CRM was expected to grow Agentforce. AVGO was expected to blow out AI numbers. There was no room for anything less than extraordinary.
This tells you something important about where we are in the cycle: the easy money from "AI = buy everything" is over. We are now in the phase where you need to identify which companies have underpriced expectations — not just strong fundamentals. The alpha is in the gap between what the market has already priced and what the business can actually deliver.
For the rest of 2026, the most important question isn't "is AI growing?" It's "what does the market think AI is doing, and where is it wrong?"