Who Owns Broadcom?

Broadcom Corporation was founded in 1991 in Irvine, California by UCLA professor Henry Samueli and his former student Henry Nicholas III, initially to build chips for cable television set-top boxes. The company went public in 1998 and became one of the defining fabless semiconductor companies of the internet era, shipping Ethernet, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and broadband silicon at enormous scale.

Broadcom built its position on connectivity: the chips inside cable modems, set-top boxes, Ethernet adapters, and later the Wi-Fi and combo chips in smartphones. By the 2010s it was a top-ten global chip company with a particular strength in the connectivity silicon that device makers could not source elsewhere.

The 2016 merger with Avago Technologies created the modern entity. Avago, itself descended from Hewlett-Packard's semiconductor division, paid roughly $37 billion for Broadcom and took its name for the combined company under CEO Hock Tan. The blocked 2018 pursuit of Qualcomm redirected the company's acquisition strategy toward software, but the semiconductor franchise continued on its own trajectory.

The AI infrastructure cycle transformed the brand's economics from 2023 onward. Broadcom's custom-accelerator business, built on its long co-design relationship with Google for the TPU program, expanded to additional hyperscale customers including a reported $10 billion Anthropic engagement and an OpenAI custom-silicon partnership disclosed in 2025. AI semiconductor revenue reached roughly $20 billion in FY2025, up about 65 percent year over year, making the Broadcom name synonymous with the custom-silicon alternative to NVIDIA.