Broadcom

Broadcom is an American semiconductor and infrastructure company whose components underpin much of the modern internet, from networking gear to custom chips. It has become an important behind-the-scenes player in the AI boom.

As labs race to secure compute, Broadcom helps design and supply the specialised silicon and networking needed to wire together enormous data centres. It featured, for example, in a deal that let Anthropic reserve city-scale computing capacity alongside Google.

Companies like Broadcom rarely make consumer headlines, but they are essential to understanding why AI is so capital-intensive: before a model can be trained, someone has to build, and power, the hardware it runs on.