In Anaheim, it appears that AI-related wealth is helping fund actual physical spaces.
According to Forbes, Ducks owner Henry Samueli was worth around $3.5 billion in 2020. Five years later, his net worth hovers around $20 billion, making him, according to my quick research, the richest NHL owner, just ahead of Stan Kroenke.
The timing of Samueli’s wealth explosion couldn’t have been better. He’s singlehandedly financing the $1.1 billion renovation of Honda Center and the surrounding $4 billion OCVibe mixed-use development, without any limited partners or co-investors.
There is no political appetite for providing public funding to sports venue projects, but the Ducks didn’t even need to ask thanks to Samueli’s stake in the company he founded in the early 1990s, Broadcom (he owns 1.9% of the company’s shares, according to the company’s annual shareholders meeting notice last month). Broadcom makes chips, an oil-like resource for the exploding AI industry, and it crucially is offering chip-hungry customers, including Google and ByteDance, an alternative to Nvidia’s dominance.
Broadcom’s net revenue ($51.6 billion) has more than doubled in five years and analysts predict that the company’s AI-specific revenue -- $12 billion last year -- could alone hit the $50 billion mark by 2027. By then, most of the Honda Center renovation and big portions of the mixed-use development project will be done.
