Broadcom Inc. is the product of two companies. Broadcom Corporation was founded in Los Angeles in 1991 by UCLA professor Henry Samueli and his former doctoral student Henry Nicholas III, and its chips helped launch cable broadband. Avago Technologies was the chip business of Hewlett-Packard and later Agilent, bought by KKR and Silver Lake in 2005. Hock Tan became Avago's CEO in 2006, and in February 2016 Avago completed a $37 billion purchase of Broadcom Corporation and took its name.
The Hock Tan playbook
Tan's approach is consistent: buy businesses whose products customers find hard to replace, keep the franchises that lead their markets, sell or shut the rest, and concentrate sales on the biggest customers. That pattern ran through LSI (2014), Broadcom Corporation (2016), Brocade (2017), CA Technologies (2018) and Symantec's enterprise unit (2019). The result is a company that turned $63.9 billion of fiscal 2025 revenue into $26.9 billion of free cash flow.
The Qualcomm block and the turn to software
In November 2017 Broadcom made an unsolicited bid for Qualcomm. CFIUS judged the deal a national security risk, partly over concern that cost cuts would weaken U.S. 5G research against Huawei, and President Trump blocked it in March 2018. Broadcom completed its move from Singapore to the United States that April and turned to software, starting with CA Technologies.
VMware
The VMware deal, announced in May 2022 and completed on 22 November 2023 at about $69 billion including debt, made Broadcom one of the largest infrastructure software companies. Broadcom ended perpetual licenses and moved customers to VMware Cloud Foundation subscriptions. The change raised costs for many customers and led to lawsuits and a European Commission investigation, but software revenue reached $27.0 billion in fiscal 2025 and rose 29% to $8.8 billion in the third quarter of fiscal 2026.
The AI chip business
Broadcom co-designs custom AI accelerators with customers such as Google, Meta, OpenAI and Anthropic, and sells the Tomahawk and Jericho Ethernet chips that connect them. AI semiconductor revenue was about $20 billion in fiscal 2025 and $16.7 billion in the single quarter to 2 August 2026, 56% of revenue, with $21.7 billion guided for the next quarter. That growth took Broadcom's market value to about $1.68 trillion by the end of September 2026.
