Origin in Hewlett-Packard The company that would later become Broadcom Inc. was established in 1961 as
HP Associates, a semiconductor products division of
Hewlett-Packard. The division separated from Hewlett-Packard as part of the
Agilent Technologies spinoff in 1999.
Formation of Avago Technologies KKR and
Silver Lake Partners acquired the Semiconductor Products Group of Agilent Technologies in 2005 for $2.6 billion and formed Avago Technologies. In August 2008, the company filed an initial public offering of $400 million. In October 2008, Avago Technologies acquired
Infineon Technologies' Munich-based bulk acoustic wave business for €21.5 million. On 6 August 2009, Avago Technologies went public on
NASDAQ with the ticker symbol AVGO. Avago Technologies announced its agreement to acquire CyOptics, an optical chip and component supplier, for $400 million in April 2013. The acquisition aimed to expand Avago Technologies' fiber optics product portfolio. Avago Technologies announced its agreement to acquire
LSI Corporation in December 2013 for $6.6 billion. The acquisition helped move Avago Technologies away from specialized products and towards a more mainstream industry, which included chips, especially storage for data centers. In August 2014, the company was the ninth-largest semiconductor company. Avago Technologies agreed to sell LSI's Axxia Networking business to
Intel for $650 million. The company also agreed to buy
PLX Technology, an integrated circuits designer, for $309 million. In February 2015, it was announced that Avago Technologies Limited had reached an agreement to acquire
Emulex Corporation for $8 per share in cash.
Acquisition of and change of name to Broadcom Limited On 28 May 2015, Avago announced that it would buy
Broadcom Corporation for $37 billion ($17 billion cash and $20 billion in shares). Avago was the nominal survivor, but the combined company would be named Broadcom Ltd. It would have annual revenue of $15 billion and a market value of $77 billion. Broadcom Corp. strengthened Avago Technologies' patent position significantly in sectors such as mobile, the data center, and the Internet of Things and made the company the ninth largest holder of patents among the top semiconductor vendors, according to an analysis by technology consulting firm
LexInnova. In May 2016,
Cypress Semiconductor announced that it acquired Broadcom Corporation's full portfolio of
IoT products for $550 million. Under the deal, Cypress acquired Broadcom's IoT products and intellectual property for Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and
Zigbee connectivity, as well as Broadcom's WICED platform and SDK for developers. The deal combined Broadcom's developer tools and connectivity technologies for IoT devices with Cypress' own programmable
system-on-a-chip (SoC) products that provide memory, computing and graphics processing for low-power devices.
Foreign investment reviews and change of name to Broadcom Inc. In 2016, Broadcom proposed merging with
Brocade Communications Systems. The acquisition proposal included a $5.5 billion price and was offered in cash. It was delayed for review by the
Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States. On 2 November 2017, Broadcom announced it would relocate its legal address from Singapore to Delaware, which would avoid the review. This action was linked to the parent company being renamed from Broadcom Limited to Broadcom Inc. The pre-2016-merger Broadcom,
Broadcom Corporation, remains a wholly owned subsidiary of the renamed parent Broadcom Inc. In mid-November 2017, Broadcom proposed to purchase
Qualcomm for US$130 billion, which was rebuffed by Qualcomm's board. The proposed hostile takeover, which was later revised to $117 billion, was blocked by
the Trump administration by an
executive order that cited national security concerns. Specifically, the
Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States expressed concerns. Broadcom, then headquartered in Singapore, was considered too close to China and chipmaker
Huawei. "A shift to Chinese dominance in 5G would have substantial negative national security consequences for the United States," CFIUS said. "While the United States remains dominant in the standards-setting space currently, China would likely compete robustly to fill any void left by Qualcomm as a result of this hostile takeover." CA Technologies, formerly known as Computer Associates, was a longtime giant in software for
mainframe computers that had expanded its offerings into software for
cloud computing. And on 5 November 2018, Broadcom announced that it had completed the acquisition of CA Technologies. On 9 August 2019, Broadcom acquired the enterprise security business of
Symantec Corporation (the consumer software portion of which is now known as
Gen Digital) for $10.7 billion in cash. The deal continued Broadcom's push into software critical for corporate infrastructure. In 2019, Broadcom was the fifth best performing
stock of the 2010s, with a total return of 1,956%.
Anti-competitive practices investigations In January 2018, it was reported that the FTC had been investigating Broadcom for several months for engaging in anti-competitive tactics while negotiating with customers. In 2021, Broadcom agreed to settle the antitrust complaint, in which the
U.S. Federal Trade Commission claimed that the company abused its monopoly power using restrictive contract terms and threats of retaliation against customers the company deemed "disloyal." Such contract terms are alleged to stifle innovation and harm competition in the global supply market. European Competition Commissioner Margrethe Vestager said that Broadcom's contract terms with six main customers would "create serious and irreversible harm to competition" if no action were taken. The company agreed to a commitment to suspend agreements containing exclusivity or quasi-exclusivity arrangements and a commitment not to enter into such agreements for seven years. Following its $69 billion acquisition of VMware in 2023, Broadcom faced renewed European regulatory scrutiny over its licensing of VMware products. In March 2026, the Cloud Infrastructure Service Providers in Europe (CISPE) trade group filed a formal complaint with the
European Commission, alleging that Broadcom's licensing of VMware products to cloud service providers infringed EU antitrust rules and requesting interim measures to halt the closure of VMware's cloud service provider programme. CISPE alleged that since the acquisition, prices had risen tenfold, with payment demanded upfront and products bundled regardless of customer need. The European Commission confirmed it was assessing the complaint. Broadcom denied the allegations, stating CISPE was "an organisation funded by hyperscalers, which misrepresent the realities of the market".
Patent suits In 2017, Broadcom filed patent suits against smart TV manufacturers. The U.S. International Trade Commission ruled in favor of the smart TV manufacturers. In 2020, Broadcom sued Netflix over multiple patent infringements. citing the declining number of traditional pay television subscribers due to the rise of streaming services. The Leichtman Research Group calculated that the largest pay TV providers in the U.S. – representing about 95% of the market – lost about 4,915,000 net video subscribers in 2019. In February 2020, Broadcom announced the world's first
WiFi 6E client device, the BCM4389. In early 2020,
Raspberry Pi Inc. revealed that their new boards would have a Broadcom BCM2711 chip. In May 2022, Broadcom announced its deal to acquire the virtualization and cloud computing software vendor
VMware for $61 billion in a combination of cash and stock, with Broadcom assuming $8 billion in VMware debt. In November 2022, the UK's
Competition and Markets Authority regulator announced it would investigate whether the Broadcom Inc. acquisition of VMware Inc. would "result in a substantial lessening of competition within any market or markets in the United Kingdom for goods or services". The
European Commission also said it was investigating the proposed acquisition, and as a result, Broadcom and VMware extended the planned completion date out to May 26, 2023. On May 19, 2023, as both UK and EU regulators had yet to complete their investigations, the completion date was formally extended to August 26, 2023, and was later further extended to as late as November 26, 2023. On November 21, 2023, Broadcom Inc. announced its plan to finalize the $69 billion acquisition of VMware Inc. on the following Wednesday. This acquisition, one of the largest in the technology sector, received global regulatory scrutiny, including from China, which approved the deal with specific conditions. These conditions require VMware's server software to be compatible with local hardware and not restrict customers to using Broadcom's hardware products. Despite concerns over rising
China-U.S. tensions, the approval from China, which was the last regulatory hurdle, allowed the deal to proceed. The transaction closed on November 22, 2023. On completion, CEO Hock Tan announced that the company would relocate its headquarters in San Jose to the VMware campus in
Palo Alto, California. In February 2024, Broadcom sold the end-user computing division, which it inherited from the VMware acquisition, to KKR for $4billion. == Corporate affairs ==