Broadcom’s 5x Surge in 3 Years: How Hock Tan, America’s Top-Paid CEO, Challenges Nvidia’s Moat

[karin623]

When people think of Nvidia’s biggest rival, most point to AMD and Lisa Su. But the real challenger today isn’t in GPUs at all—it’s Broadcom, led by the ever-blunt Hock Tan.

Over the past two years, Broadcom’s market cap has soared 261% to $1.4 trillion, making it the world’s second-largest semiconductor firm after Nvidia. Broadcom has quietly become the go-to partner for hyperscalers building their own AI ASICs, from Google’s TPUs to Meta’s accelerators.

So how exactly does Hock Tan take aim at Nvidia’s moat? Is Broadcom steadily chipping away at Nvidia’s GPU dominance—or is Nvidia’s full-stack ecosystem still an unbreakable fortress?

Broadcom’s 5x Surge in 3 Years: How Hock Tan, America’s Top-Paid CEO, Challenges Nvidia’s Moat

Liang-rong Chen

cwnewsroom.substack.com

 

[blueone]

That article is incorrect about the history of NVLink. NVLink was not developed by Mellanox, it was developed internally. First NVLink availability was 2014, Mellanox was acquired in 2019. The incompetence of the semiconductor press, worldwide, never stops amazing me.

As for Ethernet being competitive for scale-up networking, good luck with that.

I also enjoyed the quip in the article about Huang introducing two new terms in his keynote at the 2025 GTC conference, scale-up and scale-out. Seriously? Intel's data center product management people invented those terms at least 20 years ago. The article's author should consider another career, like shining shoes.