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President Donald Trump introduces Broadcom CEO Hock Tan prior to Tan announcing the repatriation of his company’s headquarters to the United States from Singapore during a ceremony in the Oval Office of the White House, in Washington, DC, November 2, 2017.

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When Broadcom tried to buy rival Qualcomm for $120 billion in 2018, its efforts were thwarted. Qualcomm rejected the offer and the Trump administration declared the deal a potential threat to national security. 

In March of that year, Broadcom withdrew the bid, which would’ve been the largest technology deal on record, and said, “Qualcomm was clearly a unique and very large acquisition opportunity.”

As it turns out, Broadcom didn’t need it.

Broadcom shares soared 24% on Friday, their best day ever, and lifted the company’s market cap past $1 trillion for the first time. The chipmaker became the eighth member of tech’s 13-figure club. Since abandoning its Qualcomm offer, Broadcom shares are up more than 760%, trouncing Qualcomm’s 165% gain over that stretch. The S&P 500 is up 119%.

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Broadcom vs. Qualcomm

At the time of its announced acquisition effort, Broadcom’s official headquarters was in Singapore, which played into the Trump administration’s concerns. Broadcom filed to redomicile in the U.S., but Trump blocked the deal anyway.

Still, Broadcom CEO Hock Tan wasn’t deterred from taking big swings. Far from it.

Broadcom has since closed three deals valued at $10 billion or more, and it has ventured far outside of its core semiconductor market in the process. It agreed to acquire legacy software vendor CA Technologies for $19 billion in July 2018, and snatched up security software company Symantec for $10.7 billion in August 2019.

Tan’s biggest bet came in 2022, when Broadcom said it was buying VMware for $61 billion, jumping into the market for server virtualization. The deal took 18 months to close, and it trails only Microsoft’s $68.7 billion acquisition of Activision Blizzard and Dell’s $67 billion purchase of EMC on the list of biggest tech deals ever.

Broadcom “started as a semiconductor company and over the last six years, we kind of moved into infrastructure software, and that has gone very well,” Tan told CNBC’s Jim Cramer in a September interview. “The recent acquisition of VMware was essentially another step towards the direction of creating a very balanced mix between” chips and infrastructure software geared to the enterprise, he said.

Broadcom CEO Hock Tan sits down with Jim Cramer

Broadcom reported better-than-expected profit in its latest quarterly earnings report on Thursday, even as revenue came in just shy of estimates. Broadcom’s artificial intelligence business has lifted overall growth to rates typically reserved for company’s a fraction its size.

In the fiscal fourth quarter, AI revenue increased 150% to $3.7 billion, with some of that growth coming from ethernet networking parts used to tie together thousands of AI chips.

That drove an overall increase in revenue of 51% to $14.05 billion. Broadcom’s infrastructure software division generated $5.82 billion in revenue for the quarter, nearly tripling from last year’s $1.97 billion, a number that included a big boost from VMware.

Within the AI boom, Broadcom hasn’t quite kept pace with Nvidia, whose graphics processing units are being used to power the training and running of the most powerful AI models. Nvidia’s market cap has swelled by over 170% this year to $3.3 trillion, behind only Apple and Microsoft among the most valuable public companies in the world. Broadcom has doubled in value this year.

While trailing Nvidia, Broadcom has still positioned itself for hefty growth at a time that former chip titan Intel is downsizing and restructuring. It’s also far surpassed Advanced Micro Devices, which is valued at $206 billion after dropping 14% this year.

Broadcom refers to its custom AI accelerators as XPUs, which are different than the GPUs Nvidia sells. Broadcom said it doubled shipments of XPUs to “our three hyperscale customers.” The company doesn’t name the customers, but analysts say the three are Meta, Alphabet and TikTok parent ByteDance.

“The outlook for AI looks very bright for both GPUs and XPUs,” analysts at Cantor wrote in a note after this week’s earnings report. The firm recommends buying Broadcom shares and lifted its 12-month target to $250 from $225. The stock closed on Friday at $224.80.

History of big deals

The company that exists today as Broadcom is the product of a 2015 merger of Avago, which spun out of Agilent Technologies in 2005, and Broadcom, which was started in southern California in 1991. While Avago was the acquiring entity, the combined company took the name Broadcom. Tan, who was named CEO of Avago in 2006, was tapped to lead it.

Broadcom’s revenue in fiscal 2016 was $13.2 billion, and its biggest business was semiconductors for set-top boxes and broadband access.

The company’s market cap topped $100 billion in 2018, at which point wired infrastructure was still the primary source of revenue. Broadcom changed its financial reporting in late 2019 to focus on semiconductor solutions and infrastructure software, with the former accounting for about 73% of revenue in 2020.

But with the addition of VMware, infrastructure software has jumped from 21% of revenue in the October quarter last year to 41% in the period that just ended. Even excluding VMware, Broadcom said the business grew 90% from a year earlier.

The company said it expects infrastructure software revenue to increase 41% year-over-year in the current quarter to $6.5 billion while semiconductor revenue will rise by 10% to $8.1 billion. AI revenue will jump 65% year-on-year to $3.8 billion, the company said.

Broadcom’s market opportunity continues to grow because of the compute demands for large language models being created and deployed by the biggest tech companies, Tan told Cramer in September. 

“Each new generation LLM requires multiple x — 2-3x, maybe more — of compute, each time, each year,” Tan said. “You can imagine that’s a driver towards a larger and larger compute opportunity, which is going to be taken up largely by XPUs”

Alphabet, Amazon, Meta and Microsoft spent a combined $58.9 billion on capital expenditures in the latest quarter, according to tech research firm Futuriom. That represented 63% growth and equaled about 18% of aggregate revenue.

Broadcom’s differentiator in the market is that it’s making very expensive custom chips for AI for the world’s top tech companies with the promise of helping them move 20% to 30% faster and use 25% less power, Piper Sandler analyst Harsh Kumar told CNBC’s “Squawk on the Street” on Friday.

“You have to be a Google, you have to be a Meta, you have to be a Microsoft or an Oracle to be able to use those chips,” Kumar said. “These chips are not meant for everybody.”

WATCH: Broadcom’s visibility through 2027 is the most important news from the call

Broadcom's visibility through 2027 is the most important news from call, says Piper Sandler's Kumar

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Trump to extend TikTok deadline for third time, pushing decision out another 90 days

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Trump to extend TikTok deadline for third time, pushing decision out another 90 days

Muhammed Selim Korkutata | Anadolu | Getty Images

For a third time since taking office in January, President Donald Trump plans to extend a deadline that would require China’s ByteDance to divest TikTok’s U.S. business.

“President Trump will sign an additional Executive Order this week to keep TikTok up and running,” White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said in a statement. “As he has said many times, President Trump does not want TikTok to go dark. This extension will last 90 days, which the Administration will spend working to ensure this deal is closed so that the American people can continue to use TikTok with the assurance that their data is safe and secure.”

ByteDance was nearing the deadline of June 19, to sell TikTok’s U.S. operations in order to satisfy a national security law that the Supreme Court upheld just a few days before Trump’s second presidential inauguration. Under the law, app store operators like Apple and Google and internet service providers would be penalized for supporting TikTok.

ByteDance originally faced a Jan. 19 deadline to comply with the national security law, but Trump signed an executive order when he first took office that pushed the deadline to April 5. Trump extended the deadline for the second time a day before that April mark.

Trump told NBC News in May that he would extend the TikTok deadline again if no deal was reached, and he reiterated his plans on Thursday.

Prior to Trump signing the first executive order, TikTok briefly went offline in the U.S. for a day, only to return after the president’s announcement. Apple and Google also removed TikTok from the Apple App Store and Google Play during TikTok’s initial U.S. shut down, but then reinstated the app to their respective app stores in February.

Multiple parties including Oracle, AppLovin, and Billionaire Frank McCourt’s Project Liberty consortium have expressed interest in buying TikTok’s U.S. operations. It’s unclear whether the Chinese government would approve a deal.

— CNBC’s Kevin Breuninger contributed to this report

WATCH: Project Liberty’s bid for TikTok is aligned with U.S. national security priorities.

Frank McCourt: Project Liberty's bid for TikTok is aligned with U.S. national security priorities

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AWS’ custom chip strategy is showing results, and cutting into Nvidia’s AI dominance

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AWS' custom chip strategy is showing results, and cutting into Nvidia's AI dominance

AWS announces new CPU chip: Here's what to know

Amazon Web Services is set to announce an update to its Graviton4 chip that includes 600 gigabytes per second of network bandwidth, what the company calls the highest offering in the public cloud.

Ali Saidi, a distinguished engineer at AWS, likened the speed to a machine reading 100 music CDs a second.

Graviton4, a central processing unit, or CPU, is one of many chip products that come from Amazon’s Annapurna Labs in Austin, Texas. The chip is a win for the company’s custom strategy and putting it up against traditional semiconductor players like Intel and AMD.

But the real battle is with Nvidia in the artificial intelligence infrastructure space.

At AWS’s re:Invent 2024 conference last December, the company announced Project Rainier – an AI supercomputer built for startup Anthropic. AWS has put $8 billion into backing Anthropic.

AWS Senior Director for Customer and Project Engineering Gadi Hutt said Amazon is looking to reduce AI training costs and provide an alternative to Nvidia’s expensive graphics processing units, or GPUs.

Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4 AI model is trained on Trainium2 GPUs, according to AWS, and Project Rainier is powered by over half a million of the chips – an order that would have traditionally gone to Nvidia.

Read more CNBC tech news

Hutt said that while Nvidia’s Blackwell is a higher-performing chip than Trainium2, the AWS chip offers better cost performance.

“Trainium3 is coming up this year, and it’s doubling the performance of Trainium2, and it’s going to save energy by an additional 50%,” he said.

The demand for these chips is already outpacing supply, according to Rami Sinno, director of engineering at AWS’ Annapurna Labs.

“Our supply is very, very large, but every single service that we build has a customer attached to it,” he said.

With Graviton4’s upgrade on the horizon and Project Rainier’s Trainium chips, Amazon is demonstrating its broader ambition to control the entire AI infrastructure stack, from networking to training to inference.

And as more major AI models like Claude 4 prove they can train successfully on non-Nvidia hardware, the question isn’t whether AWS can compete with the chip giant — it’s how much market share it can take.

The release schedule for the Graviton4 update will be provided by the end of June, according to an AWS spokesperson.

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JPMorgan moves further into crypto with stablecoin-like token JPMD

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JPMorgan moves further into crypto with stablecoin-like token JPMD

Jamie Dimon, Chairman and CEO of JPMorgan Chase & Co., speaks to the Economic Club of New York in Manhattan, New York City, on April 23, 2024.

Mike Segar | Reuters

JPMorgan Chase is taking a step further into the cryptocurrency space with its own stablecoin-like token, called JPMD.

The U.S. banking giant told CNBC on Tuesday that it’s planning to launch a so-called deposit token on Coinbase’s public blockchain Base, which is built on top of the Ethereum network. Each deposit token is meant to serve as a digital representation of a commercial bank deposit.

JPMD will offer clients round-the-clock settlement as well as the ability to pay interest to holders. It is a so-called “permissioned token,” meaning it is only available to JPMorgan’s institutional clients — unlike many stablecoins, which are publicly available.

“We see institutions using JPMD for onchain digital asset settlement solutions as well as for making cross-border business-to-business transactions,” Naveen Mallela, global co-head of Kinexys, J.P. Morgan’s blockchain unit, told CNBC Tuesday.

“Given the fact that deposit tokens would eventually be interest bearing as well, this would provide better fungibility with existing deposit products that institutions currently use,” he added.

Deposit token vs. stablecoin

JPMorgan said the benefit of launching a deposit token over a stablecoin is that it gives institutional clients a way to move money around faster and easier while still having a close connection with traditional banking systems.

A stablecoin is a type of digital token that’s designed to be pegged 1:1 to the value of a fiat currency at all times. The most popular stablecoins are Tether’s USDT and Circle’s USDC. The entire stablecoin market is worth approximately $262 billion, according to data from CoinGecko.

In the U.S., stablecoins remain broadly unregulated — although this is likely to change soon. The Senate is set to vote Tuesday on the GENIUS Act, legislation that would introduce formal regulation for such tokens.

Elsewhere, the European Union regulates stablecoins under its Markets in Crypto-Assets Regulation, or MiCA, while the U.K. has also laid out plans to regulate the crypto industry. Britain’s Financial Conduct Authority is currently consulting on proposals to require stablecoin issuers to ensure their tokens maintain their value against a given asset.

Read more CNBC tech news

JPMorgan’s digital asset chief told CNBC that the bank chose Coinbase as its blockchain partner since the crypto exchange is already a long-standing client and a leader in the crypto space.

JPMD has had “preliminary interest from large institutional players who want more native onchain cash solutions from pre-eminent and reputed financial institutions,” Mallela added.

Speculation had been building around JPMorgan’s new crypto offering after a trademark application filed by the bank for “JPMD” was made public Monday.

The trademark outlined a broad range of crypto services under the JPMD name, including trading, exchange, transfer and payment services for digital assets.

Various crypto media outlets had speculated whether the bank was about to launch its own stablecoin. However, JPMorgan says that, while its token may share some similarities with a stablecoin, it’s ultimately a different kind of product.

Watch CNBC’s full interview with JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon

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