Silicon Valley's turn of fortune: Intel has worst year ever, while Broadcom enjoys record gain
It was a big year for silicon in Silicon Valley — but a brutal one for the company most responsible for the area's moniker.
Intel, the 56-year-old chipmaker co-founded by industry pioneers Gordon Moore and Robert Noyce and legendary investor Arthur Rock, had its worst year since going public in 1971, losing 61% of its value.
The opposite story unfolded at Broadcom , the chip conglomerate run by CEO Hock Tan and headquartered in Palo Alto, California, about 15 miles from Intel's Santa Clara campus.
Broadcom's stock price soared 111% in 2024 as of Monday's close, its best performance ever. The current company is the product of a 2015 acquisition by Avago, which went public in 2009.
The driving force behind the diverging narratives was artificial intelligence. Broadcom rode the AI train, while Intel largely missed it. The changing fortunes of the two chipmakers underscores the fleeting nature of leadership in the tech industry and how a few key decisions can result in hundreds of billions — or even trillions — of dollars in market cap shifts.
Broadcom develops custom chips for Google and other huge cloud companies. It also makes essential networking gear that large server clusters need to tie thousands of AI chips together. Within AI, Broadcom has largely been overshadowed by Nvidia , whose graphics processing units, or GPUs, power most of the large language models being developed at OpenAI, Microsoft , Google and Amazon and also enable the heftiest AI workloads.
