Broadcom

Broadcom's market capitalization crossed $1.5 trillion in late 2025—the biological equivalent of a blue whale achieving dominance through strategic horizontal gene transfer. The $69 billion VMware acquisition represents not mere expansion but ecosystem engineering: Broadcom absorbed an entire software infrastructure species and integrated its capabilities into a unified organism. In fiscal 2025, revenue reached $64 billion, up 24% year-over-year, with AI hardware revenue surging 65% to $20 billion. The company custom-designs networking chips for Google and Meta, occupying a niche that even NVIDIA cannot fill—like mycorrhizal networks that connect forest ecosystems in ways aerial predators cannot replicate.

The VMware integration demonstrates platform economics at scale. Broadcom shifted 10,000 customers from perpetual licenses to subscription bundles, tripling infrastructure software revenue to $27 billion in fiscal 2025. This metabolic reconfiguration mirrors how termites convert cellulose into energy through symbiotic gut bacteria—what appears destructive to outsiders creates new resource pathways. Customer attrition reached 98% consideration of alternatives according to surveys, yet revenue grew because the remaining organisms increased their metabolic rate. Gartner predicts VMware's market share will fall from 70% in 2024 to 40% by 2029, but Broadcom extracts more nutrition from fewer hosts.

CEO Hock Tan engineered this hybrid through serial acquisitions since 2016: Brocade for storage networking, CA Technologies for mainframe software, Symantec's enterprise security. Each merger represents horizontal gene transfer—acquiring "franchise" businesses with path-dependent lock-in that customers cannot escape. Semiconductor revenue hit $30.1 billion in fiscal 2024, with AI contributing $12.2 billion, a 220% surge. The company's dual nature—custom silicon for hyperscalers plus sticky enterprise software—creates redundancy that single-product organisms lack. As Broadcom hints at future acquisitions in optical interconnects, it continues building an infrastructure web that competitors must traverse but cannot replicate.