Hock Tan: The 100 Most Influential People in AI 2026 - Time Magazine

When Hock Tan led an acquisition of Broadcom for $37 billion in 2016, the company was an icon of the dot-com era that had missed its chance to dominate mobile computing. Today, the empire he built around it is worth roughly $1.8 trillion, making it among the top ten most valuable companies in the world. Tan is increasingly in direct competition with another company often at the top of that list, Nvidia.

Broadcom is working with American AI frontrunners to develop custom chips, optimized for their specific workloads, to offer an alternative—or, at the least, complement—to market-leading Nvidia. Broadcom's push began with Google, which partnered with Broadcom to make its tensor processing units (TPU). The first generation, deployed in 2015, helped power search and Google Photos. Now in its eighth generation, Google uses TPUs exclusively for training its flagship Gemini models. In April, the tech giant extended its partnership with Broadcom to 2031. 

That same month, Anthropic signed a deal with Broadcom and Google to access multiple gigawatts of TPUs, while Meta announced it was extending its partnership with Broadcom to deploy custom chips of its own. By June, OpenAI unveiled its custom processor, Jalapeño, developed with Broadcom. The demand for its AI chips and networking equipment “is simply insatiable,” Tan told investors that month. 

The former venture capital investor is now partnering his company with Apollo Global Management and Blackstone to launch a platform intended to finance more than 20 gigawatts of AI infrastructure, beginning with a $35 billion commitment supporting Anthropic’s expansion.