Broadcom Inc.

What does Broadcom own?
Broadcom owns its semiconductor product lines, including Tomahawk, Jericho, and custom AI accelerator franchises, plus the infrastructure software businesses acquired through CA Technologies, Symantec's enterprise division, Brocade, and VMware. It holds one of the industry's largest patent portfolios in networking and connectivity.

Is Broadcom publicly traded?
Yes. Broadcom trades on NASDAQ under the ticker AVGO and is a member of the NASDAQ-100 and S&P 500. Its market capitalization passed $1 trillion in 2024.

Who founded Broadcom?
Broadcom Corporation was founded in 1991 by Henry Samueli and Henry Nicholas III in Irvine, California. The current company descends from the 2016 merger of Broadcom with Avago Technologies, whose semiconductor roots trace to Hewlett-Packard's components division founded in the 1960s.

Where is Broadcom headquartered?
Broadcom is headquartered in Palo Alto, California. It moved its corporate headquarters from Singapore to the United States in 2018.

Who owns Broadcom?
Broadcom is owned by its public shareholders, with the largest stakes held by index fund managers. Co-founder Henry Samueli chairs the board. Hock Tan has led the company since 2006, through the Avago, LSI, Broadcom, CA, Symantec, and VMware transactions.

What is Broadcom's revenue?
Broadcom reported revenue of $63.9 billion for fiscal year 2025, ended November 2, 2025, up 24 percent year over year. Semiconductor solutions contributed $36.9 billion and infrastructure software $27.0 billion.

Broadcom's lineage runs through two companies. Broadcom Corporation was founded in 1991 in Irvine, California by UCLA professor Henry Samueli and his former graduate student Henry Nicholas III, originally to develop chips for cable television set-top boxes. It went public in 1998 and became one of the defining fabless semiconductor companies of the internet era, supplying broadband, Ethernet, Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth silicon.

Avago Technologies was formed in 2005 when private equity firms KKR and Silver Lake bought Hewlett-Packard's semiconductor products group, a business dating to HP's optoelectronics work of the 1960s. Under CEO Hock Tan, Avago went public in 2009 and executed a disciplined roll-up strategy: LSI Corporation in 2014, then Broadcom Corporation in a deal announced in 2015 for approximately $37 billion, completed in February 2016. The combined company took the better-known Broadcom name, kept the Avago ticker AVGO, and moved its headquarters from Singapore to San Jose in 2018 before settling in Palo Alto.

An attempted $117 billion hostile acquisition of Qualcomm in 2018 was blocked by the Trump administration on national security grounds, ending Broadcom's run at mobile processors and redirecting the strategy toward infrastructure software. Broadcom then acquired CA Technologies for $18.9 billion in 2018 and Symantec's enterprise security division for $10.7 billion in 2019.

The largest deal came in November 2023, when Broadcom completed its approximately $61 billion acquisition of VMware after a prolonged global regulatory review. Post-close, Broadcom ended perpetual VMware licenses, consolidated the portfolio into subscription bundles led by VMware Cloud Foundation, cut thousands of jobs, and sold VMware's end-user computing division to KKR in 2024.

The AI infrastructure cycle transformed the semiconductor business. Broadcom's custom-accelerator franchise, built initially on Google's TPU program, expanded to additional hyperscale customers; in 2025 the company disclosed a roughly $10 billion AI order widely reported as Anthropic and a separate engagement with OpenAI for custom silicon. AI semiconductor revenue approximately doubled through fiscal 2025, making Broadcom the most direct public-market beneficiary of custom AI silicon demand after NVIDIA.

Broadcom publishes annual ESG reporting covering emissions, supply chain labor standards through the Responsible Business Alliance, and water use in its remaining manufacturing operations. The company holds no B Corp or equivalent certifications, standard for the semiconductor sector. Its most material environmental exposure sits in its supply chain, where foundry manufacturing energy and water intensity dominate its footprint.

The VMware transition generated the sharpest public criticism attached to Broadcom in years. Ending perpetual licenses, consolidating products into VCF bundles, restructuring the partner program into invite-only tiers, and raising effective prices produced documented customer backlash, lawsuits from customers including Tesco, Siemens, and T-Mobile US, and a European Commission request for information on Broadcom's licensing practices. Broadcom responded in 2025 and 2026 with concessions including per-core licensing standardization, license portability across cloud providers, and a pledge to update the lower-tier vSphere Standard product.

Earlier, the company settled a 2020 SEC matter over accounting practices, and its 2018 Qualcomm pursuit drew national security intervention that effectively ended the bid. Customer lawsuits and EU scrutiny over VMware terms remain open issues as of September 2026.