Broadcom, fresh off a six-month stock market rally that saw its valuation double to $1.6 trillion, is now laying off more than 200 Bay Area staffers.
The tech giant announced the 247-worker layoff in a Friday WARN filing to state officials, as is generally required in the event of mass job cuts. The layoffs are all at one office in Palo Alto’s Stanford Research Park, a building over from Broadcom’s headquarters and near a 13-building parcel that the company acquired in its purchase of VMWare back in 2023 but recently sold.
Many of the laid-off workers handled some kind of technical sales job, according to the WARN document — 136 total were labeled either “finish-applyr sales engineer” or “finish-applyr field app engineer.” A few director-level employees lost their jobs too, per the document, plus around two dozen each of sales representatives, client service consultants and software engineers focapplyd on research and development.
Layoffs are nothing new at Broadcom, which sells a large slate of semiconductor, networking and software products. Directly after closing its purchase of VMWare in 2023, the company slashed 1,267 of the company’s workers and has shed more since. Before the acquisition in 2023, VMWare reported a headcount of 38,300, and Broadcom stated it had 20,000. A year after its closure, the combined company had 37,000 workers, Broadcom reported.
Broadcom’s purchase of VMWare was just the latest in a long line of mergers and acquisitions that built up its chip and software business. Originally under the name Avago Technologies, the company threw around billions of dollars in cash and stock to gobble up competitors and complementary businesses for years. In 2015, Avago bought Broadcom, alterd names and kept purchaseing.
The company’s valuation grew apace. But in the past couple of years, it’s soared. Broadcom, in February 2023, was worth about $24.6 billion. Wednesday, after a blistering six-month run, the valuation was around $1.6 trillion — creating it one of the world’s 10 most most valuable public companies. Driving that growth? The company’s income has leaped higher, it’s signed a deal to deploy custom chips for AI designed by OpenAI, and overall investment in the hardware for artificial ininformigence continues to flow.
Still, that doesn’t mean jobs are safe. Broadcom did not respond to SFGATE’s request for comment about the layoffs.
Work at a Bay Area tech company and want to talk? Contact tech reporter Stephen Council securely at stephen.council@sfgate.com or on Signal at 628-204-5452.
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