Broadcom Acquires VMware for $61 billion

Chip manufacturer Broadcom has confirmed that an acquisition agreement has been signed with software developer VMWare. Broadcom is paying $61 billion for the company, which recently made headlines for actively exploiting security vulnerabilities. The details of the reported deal Reuters news agency Accordingly, Broadcom will pay a total of $61 billion in stock and cash for VMWare.

It is one of the largest tech mergers of all time, according to Reuters, merging the software assets of chipmaker Broadcom with those of VMware, a leader in cloud computing and virtualization technology. Broadcom announced the acquisition today. VMWare was “spun off” from Dell Technologies last year. The main shareholder is IT veteran Michael Dell, who currently owns 40.2 percent of VMWare shares.

The merger is expected to expand Broadcom’s offerings to customers and provide “greater choice and flexibility in building, running, managing, connecting and protecting applications at scale in diverse, distributed environments,” the company said in a joint press release.

Previous acquisitions failed

As part of the transaction, VMware shareholders can elect to receive $142.50 in cash or just over a quarter of a Broadcom share for each VMware share. This represents a 49 percent premium to VMware’s stock price on Friday before the transaction was announced. Broadcom had swallowed a few businesses over the years, but things didn’t always go the way the Singapore-based company had envisioned.

In 2017, Broadcom made an offer to acquire rival chipmaker Qualcomm for $117 billion, but the deal was blocked by the administration of then-President Donald Trump on national security grounds. Qualcomm operates primarily in the United States but is headquartered in Singapore.