Episode 48: Qualcomm - Broadcom

**Ben Gilbert** (0:17)
Welcome back to episode 48 of Acquired, the podcast about technology, acquisitions, and IPOs. I'm Ben Gilbert.

**David Rosenthal** (0:24)
I'm David Rosenthal.

**Ben Gilbert** (0:25)
And we are your hosts. Today, we are covering what would be the biggest tech acquisition of all time, Broadcom acquiring Qualcomm. And as we record, the current status of the deal was it was rejected today for a price of $103 billion, not including the accounting for the debt that is part of the deal. And it'll be really fascinating to see how this how this unfolds in front of us, David.

**David Rosenthal** (0:51)
Yeah, the battle of the comms.

**Ben Gilbert** (0:53)
Yeah, 1M versus 2 Who will win?

**David Rosenthal** (0:57)
Reminds me of 3Com.

**Ben Gilbert** (0:59)
Yes. It's incredibly, incredibly creative names in this industry.

**David Rosenthal** (1:03)
Yeah. Well, I think one of the themes we'll get into today is what's old is new again. And so, you know, it's like we're back in the year 2001 here.

**Ben Gilbert** (1:13)
Okay. So for listeners who are maybe not as deep in in semiconductor companies and wondering sort of what these companies do, they're both effectively fabless semiconductor companies. So neither of them have fabs, which are the fabrication facilities that actually manufacture the chips these days, with the exception of maybe Intel, Samsung, TSMC. Most of the chip designers are not actually the chip manufacturers because it's so expensive to create them. So both of these companies design and then work with contract manufacturing partners to manufacture the chips that go inside your phone and other computing devices. And they make everything from the actual processors themselves to wireless radios. And we'll get into that more in the show. But it's basically component makers for phones, computers, servers, et cetera.

**David Rosenthal** (2:06)
And your car, your toaster, your everything these days.

**Ben Gilbert** (2:11)
That's right. IoT explosion. Well, before we get too much into it, a couple of quick reminders. We've got a Slack where we are over 1,000 strong. So if you like to talk about M&A, IPOs, tech news, or just add another Slack because Lord knows we cannot be in too many of those, go to Acquired.fm. You can join in the sidebar or on mobile down at the bottom. The other thing is we love reviews. So if you like the show and you think other people would like it too, pause the show right now. You can always come back to it and go leave a quick review on Apple podcasts. You can do that through, I think, through the iTunes Store. This is a great time to tell you about one of our very favorite companies, Crusoe.

**David Rosenthal** (2:55)
So Crusoe, as listeners know by now, is a clean compute cloud provider specifically built for AI workloads. NVIDIA is one of their major partners and literally Crusoe's data centers are nothing but racks and racks of A100s and H100s. And because Crusoe's cloud is purpose built for AI and run on wasted, stranded, or clean energy, they can provide significantly better performance per dollar than traditional cloud providers.

**Ben Gilbert** (3:20)
Yes, we talked about that on our ACQ2 episode with Crusoe CEO Chase Lockmiller.

**David Rosenthal** (3:26)
The other element that makes Crusoe special is the environmental angle. Crusoe, of course, locates their data centers at stranded energy sites. So think oil flares, wind farms that can't use all the energy they generate, etc. And uses that power that would otherwise be wasted to run your AI workloads instead.

**Ben Gilbert** (3:44)
Yep. Obviously, it's a huge benefit for the environment and for customers on cost, since Crusoe doesn't rely on the energy grid. Energy is the second largest cost of running AI after, of course, the price you pay in NVIDIA for the chips. And these lower energy costs get passed on to customers.

**David Rosenthal** (4:00)
It's super cool that they can put their data centers out there in these remote locations where quote-unquote energy happens, as opposed to the other hyperscalers such as AWS and Google and Azure, who need to build their data centers close to major traffic hubs where the internet happens because they are doing everything in their clouds.

**Ben Gilbert** (4:16)
Yep. If you, your company, or your portfolio companies would like to use the lower cost and more performant infrastructure for your AI workloads, go to crusocloud.com/acquired, that's crusoecloud.com/acquired, or click the link in the show notes. All right. With that, David, are you ready to take us in?

**David Rosenthal** (4:38)
Yeah. But before we get into history and facts today, I think there's some stage setting that'll probably come back in tech themes, but I want to do upfront. We were joking a minute ago about what's old being new again in Silicon Valley right now, and the old that is new is the Silicon in Silicon Valley. There's obviously this deal which is potentially going through largest technology acquisition of all time, Broadcom buying Qualcomm, but that's far from the only thing happening in the semiconductor world right now.