Broadcom: The $37 Billion Name Swap Behind a $2 Trillion Chip Empire

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Broadcom Inc. traces its roots to 1961, when it began as HP Associates, a semiconductor division inside Hewlett-Packard making LED displays and optical sensors. The unit went with Agilent Technologies in HP's 1999 spinoff, and in 2005 KKR and Silver Lake Partners bought it for $2.6 billion and renamed it Avago Technologies. Avago went public in 2009, bought LSI Corporation for $6.6 billion in 2013, and in 2015 agreed to buy Broadcom Corporation for $37 billion in cash and stock. The buyer then dropped its own name and became Broadcom Inc., taking on the prestige of the Broadcom patents in Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and broadband. In late 2017 it launched a hostile bid for Qualcomm valued between $117 billion and $130 billion and announced a move of its legal headquarters from Singapore to Delaware to avoid CFIUS review, but the Trump administration blocked the deal by executive order on national security grounds.

Shut out of more chip deals, CEO Hock Tan turned to infrastructure software: CA Technologies for $18.9 billion in 2018, Symantec's enterprise security business for $10.7 billion, and VMware in a $69 billion deal announced in 2022 that closed in late 2023 after a last-minute approval from China. Broadcom moved its headquarters onto the VMware campus in Palo Alto and sold VMware's end user computing unit to KKR for $4 billion. By 2025 revenue was 58 percent semiconductors and 42 percent software. In 2021 it settled antitrust investigations with the FTC and the European Union, and in 2026 the European cloud trade group CISPE complained that VMware licensing prices had risen tenfold. Meanwhile Broadcom became a key partner in the AI buildout, and in April 2026 it became the sixth company in U.S. history to pass a $2 trillion market value.

• The CFIUS concern was that Broadcom would cut Qualcomm's 5G research and leave room for Huawei to set global wireless standards.
• In 2020 Broadcom, a major maker of cable set-top box chips, sued Netflix over video streaming patents.
• Broadcom co-developed Google's TPU and Meta's MTIA chip, and was reported in 2024 to be working with OpenAI on a custom inference chip.
• Its Tomahawk 5 networking switch routes data between AI processors at 51.2 terabits per second.
• CA Technologies makes mainframe software that banks use to process card transactions, one of several hard-to-replace layers Broadcom now owns.