Broadcom has extended its long-running relationship with Apple through 2031, signing new multi-year agreements to design and supply a range of custom chips for the iPhone maker.
The deal deepens one of the most important supplier relationships in consumer electronics, and it sent Broadcom’s shares up around 4% as investors read it as a guarantee of years of locked-in revenue. It also lands while the whole industry is scrambling for secure long-term chip supply.
Broadcom has been inside Apple’s products for years, even if its name rarely appears on them. It supplies the radio-frequency components that let iPhones connect to cellular networks, along with Wi-Fi and Bluetooth chips and other networking parts, the unglamorous silicon that makes a phone actually communicate. The new agreements cover custom ASIC products, application-specific chips built for particular jobs, across multiple future generations of Apple hardware.
The commercial weight of the relationship runs both ways. Analysts estimate that Apple accounts for roughly 20% of Broadcom’s annual revenue, which makes the iPhone maker one of its largest customers and gives an extension like this real meaning for Broadcom’s earnings visibility. Knowing a fifth of your revenue is contracted out to 2031 is the kind of certainty chip suppliers rarely get.
For Apple, the logic is supply-chain resilience. The company has spent recent years locking in long-term agreements with the chipmakers it depends on, a hedge against the shortages and geopolitical disruptions that have repeatedly rattled the electronics industry. Guaranteeing years of Broadcom silicon removes one variable from a supply chain Apple has been working hard to make more predictable.
The deal builds on a foundation laid in 2023, when the two companies announced a multibillion-dollar agreement for Broadcom to develop and manufacture 5G radio-frequency components in the United States. That earlier pact was as much about where the chips would be made as what they would do, and the new agreements extend the same logic of committing early and committing long.
There is a subtler signal in the timing, too. Apple has been trying for years to design more of its own connectivity silicon and reduce its reliance on outside suppliers, and an extension running all the way to 2031 suggests that transition is going slower than the company might have hoped. Analysts read the length of the deal as a sign that Apple’s move to homegrown radio chips is likely to take several more years.
The backdrop is an industry racing to build custom silicon for everything. From hyperscalers designing their own AI accelerators to Google splitting its next-generation TPU, the largest technology companies increasingly want chips tailored to their exact needs rather than off-the-shelf parts. Broadcom has positioned itself as the partner that helps them do it, and the Apple extension is a marquee example of that business.
That custom-silicon business has become the more exciting half of Broadcom’s story. The company’s work designing bespoke AI chips for big cloud customers has driven much of its recent share-price surge, and an anchor client like Apple committing for another five years reinforces the pitch that Broadcom is a core supplier to the companies building the future of computing, not just a legacy components vendor.
For Apple, keeping Broadcom close also buys flexibility. Having a proven partner locked in through 2031 means it can pursue its own connectivity chips at its own pace without risking a gap in supply if that effort slips, making the deal as much an insurance policy on Apple’s in-house ambitions as a vote of confidence in Broadcom.
What the agreement does not do is change the near-term product roadmap in any visible way. The chips it covers will show up quietly inside future iPhones and other devices, doing the connectivity work most users never think about. The significance is structural: two companies that need each other have decided to stay bound together for another five years, and the market treated that as good news for both.
