Broadcom

Broadcom Inc. (NASDAQ: AVGO) is a US semiconductor and infrastructure-software company headquartered in Palo Alto, California, and led by chief executive Hock Tan. The current company was formed in 2016 when Avago Technologies acquired the original Broadcom Corporation (founded 1991) and adopted the Broadcom name; it later acquired the enterprise-software firm VMware in 2023. As of 2025, roughly 58% of revenue came from semiconductor products and 42% from infrastructure software (Source: en.wikipedia.org).

Role in AI compute

Broadcom's relevance to AI policy comes from two semiconductor businesses that sit underneath the frontier-model build-out. First, it is the leading external design partner for hyperscaler custom AI accelerators — generically termed XPUs — co-developing application-specific silicon that lets cloud operators reduce dependence on Nvidia GPUs. It has a long-standing role co-designing Google's TPU line and works with Meta and other large customers. Second, its Ethernet switching and networking silicon (the Tomahawk and Jericho families) is widely used to build the high-bandwidth fabric that connects accelerators inside AI data centers.

Broadcom has guided to a substantial expansion of its AI revenue, with Hock Tan publicly framing a fiscal-2027 AI revenue target near $100 billion supported by a large committed customer backlog, and reporting custom-silicon and AI-networking growth through fiscal 2026 (Source: hashrateindex.com). These figures are company guidance and analyst estimates rather than audited results and are tracked here at medium confidence.

OpenAI custom-silicon partnership

Broadcom is the design partner for OpenAI's custom-chip program. Reporting through late 2025 and 2026 described a multi-gigawatt custom-accelerator commitment between the two companies, and on June 24, 2026 OpenAI and Broadcom unveiled Jalapeño, described as OpenAI's first custom inference accelerator, co-developed from design to tape-out in nine months and built specifically for large-language-model inference rather than adapted from general-purpose AI silicon. Broadcom said the partners would deploy the chip at gigawatt scale with Microsoft and other partners beginning in 2026, with engineering samples already running workloads including GPT-5.3-Codex-Spark; OpenAI reported early performance-per-watt substantially better than the prevailing state of the art (Source: openai.com).

Apple partnership

Broadcom disclosed in a July 6, 2026 securities filing that it and Apple extended their technology collaboration through 2031, with new multi-year agreements to develop and supply custom chips — including ASICs supporting Apple's AI servers planned for deployment as early as 2027, reported as Apple's first chips designed for AI servers; Broadcom shares rose 4% in pre-market trading on the disclosure (Source: bloomberg.com). Apple announced the deal on July 8, 2026 as worth more than $30 billion, covering custom silicon and wireless components designed and manufactured in the U.S.; Broadcom will invest $1.5 billion to expand its Fort Collins, Colorado plant to produce at least 15 billion chips, and Apple framed the arrangement as part of its $600 billion four-year U.S. investment commitment (Source: channelnewsasia.com; ca.finance.yahoo.com).

Samsung memory and foundry agreement

On July 24, 2026, Broadcom signed a memorandum of understanding with Samsung Electronics valued at more than $200 billion, covering HBM4 and HBM4E high-bandwidth-memory supply and 2-nanometer foundry manufacturing for Broadcom's next-generation AI chips through 2030. Subsequent reporting described the scope as spanning memory, foundry and advanced packaging on Samsung's 2-nanometer and below processes, and as including joint development of HBM4E and HBM5. The agreement was signed at an AI summit in San Francisco (Source: thestar.com.my; cnbc.com).

Policy relevance

Broadcom is a central node in the shift toward custom, non-Nvidia AI silicon, which bears on the economics of inference, on AI-infrastructure capital expenditure, and on competition questions about concentration in the compute stack. Its networking and accelerator businesses are part of the AI compute supply chain that US export-control and industrial policy increasingly treat as strategically significant.

Relationships

• related: Nvidia & TSMC — AI Compute Infrastructure, OpenAI, Google DeepMind, Meta AI, Microsoft, Inference Economics and Token Pricing, AI Infrastructure Capex, Semiconductor Supply Chain, AI Antitrust.