Broadcom

Broadcom designs chips that most people never see but use every day. Today's company was formed in 2016, when Avago Technologies, a chipmaker whose roots go back to Hewlett-Packard's semiconductor division, bought the original Broadcom Corporation and took its name. Like NVIDIA or Apple, it is fabless: it designs the chips and pays foundries such as TSMC to manufacture them.

Its chips cover several areas. Its switch chips move data between the thousands of servers in a data center, so they are central to the networks that connect GPUs for AI training. It makes Wi-Fi and Bluetooth chips for phones, chips for broadband modems and set-top boxes, and controllers for storage. It also builds custom AI accelerators (ASICs) together with large tech companies: the customer brings its ideas, Broadcom turns them into a chip that can be manufactured. Google's TPU is the best-known example.

Broadcom has grown mostly through acquisitions, and in recent years it bought large software companies too: CA Technologies, the enterprise security business of Symantec and, in 2023, VMware, the leading maker of virtualization software. Its usual approach is to focus on the products and big customers that bring the most profit, which sometimes means price and licensing changes that customers notice.