Broadcom Guides Three Numbers for Wednesday Night, and Earnings Per Share Is Not One of Them. Three Previews Carry Three Different EPS Estimates.

by Yemi Abiodun · August 31, 2026

Guidance & Outlook Reporter, Earnings Dispatch

Broadcom will report third-quarter fiscal 2026 results after Wednesday's close. The company confirmed the date in its own announcement, which said it "today announced it will report its third quarter fiscal year 2026 financial results and business outlook on Wednesday, September 2, 2026 after the close of the market." The management call follows at 2 p.m. Pacific, 5 p.m. Eastern. The quarter being reported ended August 2, 2026, per the outlook section of the company's own second-quarter release. The company has not reported the quarter, and nothing below describes a result.

What Broadcom did publish, in the release announcing its second-quarter results on June 3, is a three-line outlook: revenue of approximately $29.4 billion; non-GAAP operating income of approximately 67% of projected revenue; and adjusted EBITDA of approximately 68% of projected revenue. That is the whole guide. There is no earnings-per-share range, GAAP or non-GAAP, and no net income figure. Broadcom does not guide the line that most of the coverage of Wednesday night will be organised around.

Three previews, three estimates, three different bases

Three third-party previews accessed on August 31 carry three different earnings-per-share figures for the quarter. A week-ahead earnings calendar published by Kiplinger lists $3.24. A TipRanks preview published August 30 gives $3.21 alongside a revenue estimate of $29.25 billion, describing the earnings figure as 90% year-on-year growth. A Barchart preview published July 27 gives $2.83, describing it as a 124.6% increase against $1.26 in the prior-year quarter.

The spread between the low and high of those three is 41 cents, or about 14% of the smallest of them. Some of that is drift; the July figure is five weeks older than the others. But the arithmetic in the previews themselves points at something else. Kiplinger's $3.24 at a stated 91.7% increase and TipRanks' $3.21 at a stated 90% increase both imply a prior-year base of about $1.69, while Barchart states its own base outright at $1.26. Those two bases are not the same quarter measured two ways by accident, and the implied-base calculation is ours, not the previews'.

On disclosure the three are not equal, though none is complete. Kiplinger states that its earnings estimate data is "provided by Refinitiv, an LSEG business, via Yahoo! Finance, and S&P Global Market Intelligence via Briefing.com" - two compilers named, without saying which produced the $3.24. The TipRanks and Barchart previews attribute their figures to analysts generally and name no compiler at all. None of the three states whether its number is a GAAP or a non-GAAP measure. On Thursday morning, some of the same outlets will describe Wednesday's print as a beat or a miss against one of these figures. Without a stated basis, that comparison cannot be checked by a reader.

The basis question is not academic at Broadcom. In the second quarter the company reported GAAP diluted earnings per share of $1.91 and non-GAAP diluted earnings per share of $2.44, on GAAP net income of $9,310 million and non-GAAP net income of $12,074 million. The wedge between the two bottom lines was $2,764 million in a single quarter, and 53 cents a share. An estimate that does not say which of those two lines it is estimating is not a number you can score a company against.

The quarter the guide is measured from

Broadcom's second quarter ended May 3, 2026, and the filed release gives the comparatives. Revenue was $22,187 million against $15,004 million in the prior-year quarter. GAAP diluted earnings per share were $1.91 against $1.03. Adjusted EBITDA was $15,244 million, or 69% of revenue. By segment, semiconductor solutions produced $15,009 million, or 68% of the total, and infrastructure software $7,178 million, or 32%. Free cash flow was $10,262 million.

Hock Tan, Broadcom's president and chief executive, opened his statement in that release: "Broadcom achieved record revenue, operating profit and free cash flow in Q2 driven by accelerating growth in AI semiconductor revenue and strong operating leverage." The statement continues into the third-quarter AI figures quoted below.

Set the guide against that base and the size of the step being asked for becomes clear. Approximately $29.4 billion for the third quarter is about 33% above the $22,187 million just reported, sequentially, in a single quarter. Coverage of the June 3 call put the same figure at 84% year-on-year growth. Sequential steps of that size are rare outside a supply ramp, and they are the reason the revenue line, not the earnings line, is where this print will be decided.

Two of the third-quarter component figures come from the filed release itself, in Hock Tan's quoted statement: semiconductor revenue from AI expected "to grow over 200 percent year-over-year to $16.0 billion" in the third quarter, against $10.8 billion in the second quarter. The rest of the breakdown was given on the call and reported in call coverage published the same day rather than in the filed release, and we label it accordingly: total semiconductor revenue of approximately $20.5 billion, up 124%; non-AI semiconductor revenue of approximately $4.5 billion, up 12%; infrastructure software revenue of approximately $8.9 billion, up 31%; and consolidated gross margin expected to decline to approximately 74%, on AI mix. That software figure is a company-guided number reported in the call coverage, not a residual: subtracting the guided semiconductor total from the guided consolidated revenue happens to land in the same place.

What a percentage guide does and does not pin down

Because Broadcom guides its two profit lines as percentages of "projected revenue" rather than as dollar amounts, the implied dollar figures inherit the imprecision of the word approximately in front of $29.4 billion. Non-GAAP operating income at approximately 67% of approximately $29.4 billion is approximately $19.7 billion; adjusted EBITDA at approximately 68% is approximately $20.0 billion. Both are our arithmetic. A revenue outcome half a billion either side of the guide moves each of those by more than $300 million without the company's guided percentages being wrong at all.

That is a defensible way to guide a business whose mix is shifting fast, and it is more informative than a single EPS range would be about where the operating leverage sits. But it has a consequence for the reporting: the distance between Broadcom's guidance and the number the market will score it on has to be bridged by someone, and on the evidence of this week's previews that bridging is being done without any of the three previews stating an accounting basis, and in two of the three without naming a compiler at all.

The comparison this desk will make on Wednesday night is the printed revenue against the approximately $29.4 billion Broadcom published on June 3, the printed non-GAAP operating income and adjusted EBITDA against the guided 67% and 68% of actual revenue, and the printed AI semiconductor revenue against the $16.0 billion figure given in the June 3 release itself. Any earnings-per-share comparison will state both the GAAP and the non-GAAP figure and will name the source of whatever estimate it is set against.

US markets were open as this was written. No share price or price move for Monday's session is stated here, and no view is offered on Broadcom stock.