Tan was born in Penang, then a British protectorate, in 1951 or 1952. A scholarship took him to MIT in 1971, where he earned bachelor's and master's degrees in mechanical engineering in 1975, and he later took an MBA at Harvard Business School. He then held finance roles at General Motors and PepsiCo, returned to Malaysia as a director at Hume Industries, a building materials maker, and became managing director of Pacven Investment, a Singapore venture capital firm he co-founded.
Tan moved into technology in 1992 as a vice president at Commodore International. In 1994 he joined Integrated Circuit Systems, a Pennsylvania chipmaker, becoming senior vice president in 1995 and chief executive in 1999; under him it was taken private and sold to a group led by senior management, Bain Capital and Bear Stearns. Avago was created in 2005 when private equity bought Agilent Technologies' semiconductor products group for $2.66 billion, and Tan was hired to run it.
In 2015 Avago merged with Broadcom Corporation after acquiring it, creating Broadcom Inc., which Tan runs. In 2017 he led a $117 billion bid for rival Qualcomm, which would have been the largest technology deal ever; the US government blocked it in March 2018. Broadcom finished moving from Singapore back to the United States in April 2018, and Tan then expanded its software business, buying CA Technologies in 2018 and Symantec's corporate security business in 2019. He has sat on Meta's board since February 2024.
On Broadcom's September 2 call, the company said AI chip revenue would reach about $115 billion in fiscal 2027 and about $230 billion in fiscal 2028, and Tan said Anthropic is "on track to become our largest XPU customer in 2027". Broadcom is also financing that demand, with a $60 billion package for Anthropic's chip build-out. In October, at a conference in Singapore, he warned that "a lot of investors have no clue what they are investing in" and that capital could become the AI industry's binding constraint. He sets Broadcom's capital allocation at its December board meeting.
Sources · written 16 October 2026
