LEGACY LEADERSHIP: Predecessor company founded by Henry Samueli and Henry T. Nicholas III in Redondo Beach in 1991, setting the stage for one of California’s greatest tech success stories.
HQ: Palo Alto (successor company)
OC SIGNIFICANCE: Reached $2T in market capitalization in May, making it the world’s seventh most valuable publicly traded company at that time. Broadcom has been riding a wave of enthusiasm for its customized AI chips, which it sells to companies including Alphabet, Meta, OpenAI and Anthropic. The shares rose ninefold in the past five years.
DEFINING MOMENT: Samueli and Nicholas moved to Irvine in 1995 and vaulted into the ranks of billionaires shortly after going public in 1998. The current version of Broadcom is the result of its 2016 acquisition by Avago Technologies in a cash-and-stock transaction valued at $37B. Avago eventually changed its name to Broadcom Inc. Irvine was Broadcom’s headquarters for more than two decades before the Avago deal.
BY THE NUMBERS: Samueli says that 99.99% of all Internet traffic flows somewhere through at least one Broadcom chip somewhere in the network. Broadcom’s AI semiconductor revenue rose 65% to $20B in fiscal 2025; the company last December said it had a $73B backlog. Analysts have been forecasting sales will grow 62% this fiscal year to $103.3B, followed by 54% growth in fiscal 2027 to $159B. Company has some 33K employees, including 1,300 in Orange County.
QUOTABLE: “We transformed internet access from telephone line modems to cable modems… We knew we had something special when we developed our first cable modem chip. Usually when you speed something up by 20% to 30%, people get really excited. Speeding it up by a factor of 1,000 was unheard of.” —Henry Samueli during a 2026 interview on being inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame
FUN FACT: Samueli’s wealth has soared in the past year. Last July, the Business Journal estimated his net worth at $29B. Now, he might be worth more than $40B, as his 1.8% stake in Broadcom alone is estimated at $35.6B.
