Broadcom

Henry Samueli and Henry Nicholas founded Broadcom in 1991 while Samueli was still a professor at UCLA. The company began in Nicholas's garage with $5,000 in seed funding. Their initial focus was on broadband communications chips — technology that would eventually enable cable modems, DSL, and the internet infrastructure most people use every day.

Broadcom went public in April 1998, raising $115 million at a $1.2 billion valuation. By the end of 1999, the stock had risen over 1,000% and both founders were billionaires. The dot-com bubble had turned a garage chip startup into one of the most valuable semiconductor companies in the world in under two years.

Henry Nicholas, the CEO who had built Broadcom's aggressive sales culture, was indicted in 2008 on charges including securities fraud related to stock options backdating and drug offences. The charges were eventually dismissed, but not before damaging the company's reputation. Among the accusations: that Nicholas had built a secret entertainment lair beneath his Laguna Hills mansion. The lair was real.

Broadcom completed the acquisition of VMware for $69 billion in November 2023 — one of the largest technology acquisitions in history. CEO Hock Tan immediately restructured VMware's pricing, converting customers to subscription models and dramatically increasing costs. Enterprise customers were furious. Broadcom's revenue nearly doubled. Wall Street approved. The VMware deal transformed Broadcom from a chipmaker into a hybrid semiconductor and infrastructure software company.

Broadcom emerged as one of the primary winners of the AI infrastructure boom through its custom AI accelerators — XPUs — designed specifically for Google, Meta, and other hyperscalers. AI semiconductor revenue reached $19.9 billion in fiscal 2025, growing 63% year-over-year. A $10 billion TPU rack order from a major hyperscaler, followed by an $11 billion follow-on order, pushed Broadcom's total AI order backlog to $73 billion. CEO Hock Tan told investors the company had "line of sight to achieve AI revenue from chips in excess of $100 billion in 2027." The company that started in a UCLA garage with $5,000 had become the second most important AI chip company in the world.