Hock Tan built Broadcom by buying things. So it carried some weight when the chief executive, who assembled one of the industry’s largest chip companies through a long run of acquisitions, said dealmaking has slipped down his list of priorities.
Speaking at the Bloomberg Tech conference in San Francisco on Thursday, Tan said Broadcom is less focused on acquisitions now because AI offers stronger growth than an outside transaction is likely to.
The logic is arithmetic. With AI revenue surging, Tan questioned what acquisition could plausibly match the growth rate the company is already getting organically.
\For a serial acquirer, the calculation has inverted: where buying scale once accelerated growth, the AI business is now growing fast enough on its own that a deal would more likely dilute the trajectory than lift it.
The 💜 of EU techThe latest rumblings from the EU tech scene, a story from our wise ol' founder Boris, and some questionable AI art. It's free, every week, in your inbox. Sign up now!That is a notable shift in posture for Broadcom specifically. The company’s identity has been bound up with its acquisitions, a strategy that turned a mid-tier chipmaker into a sprawling semiconductor and software conglomerate. Tan stepping back from that playbook, even rhetorically, signals how completely the AI cycle has rearranged the incentives for the companies supplying it.
