In Nvidia’s Shadow, How Broadcom Became the World’s Eighth-Largest Company

Broadcom has grown into the world’s eighth-largest company without joining the club of household technology names. Its shares never became part of labels such as “FANG” or the “Magnificent Seven,” and its products rarely carry its own name. Broadcom chips sit inside every iPhone, but the Apple logo appears on the device.

The company’s profile is also shaped by its understated chief executive, Hock Tan. Unlike Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, known for his distinctive leather jackets, or Elon Musk, whose public statements often provoke controversy, Tan has quietly pursued a different strategy: buying one business after another, selling unprofitable divisions and using the proceeds to finance further acquisitions.

Broadcom now makes networking chips, customized artificial-intelligence accelerators that compete with Nvidia’s expensive GPUs, communications chips and infrastructure software. Its largest customers include Google and Meta, which use Broadcom to help produce their own AI chips. Apple recently extended a multibillion-dollar partnership with Broadcom through 2031. OpenAI and Anthropic are also customers.

The latest quarterly figures showed that growth remains strong. Revenue rose 86% year on year to $29.6 billion, operating profit increased 171% to $16 billion, and net profit tripled to $13.8 billion. Broadcom raised its full-year forecast and its revenue outlook for subsequent years. Yet the stock fell after the results because investors had expected even more.

Tan’s acquisition strategy transformed the company. Avago, the semiconductor business spun off from Hewlett-Packard’s noncore operations and later bought by private-equity investors, retained the stock ticker AVGO after Tan became chief executive in 2006. Broadcom later added CA Technologies, cybersecurity company Symantec and virtualization-software leader VMware. A $117 billion hostile bid for Qualcomm in 2018 failed after Donald Trump opposed it on national-security grounds.