How Broadcom stays efficient and nimble with monorepos

Broadcom is a global technology leader providing semiconductor, enterprise software, and security solutions to thousands of customers worldwide. Their engineering organization manages a wide portfolio of complex applications, including the VMware suite of products. As their frontend architecture team grew, so did the cost of fragmented tooling, inconsistent workflows, and infrastructure overhead — challenges that ultimately led them to Nx.

Challenge

Managing software development at enterprise scale requires coordination across multiple teams and products, each with their own unique constraints, user groups, and legacy systems.

• Developers were losing significant time to infrastructure work: configuring builds, debugging CI pipelines, and waiting for tests to run

• Every hour spent on DevOps was an hour not spent building features

• Teams had developed deeply entrenched workflows, preferred coding styles, and familiar toolchains they were reluctant to abandon

• Moving to a shared monorepo met internal cultural resistance from teams accustomed to working autonomously

Consolidating and standardizing development processes was an obvious priority, and a monorepo was a logical starting point — combining multiple projects into a single repository to improve cohesion. But the technical challenges of the migration were compounded by organizational friction. Teams weren't just being asked to change their tools; they were being asked to give up the autonomy they'd built their workflows around.

We had to go against some of the internal culture of people being more comfortable with their own style of programming. So we had to show them the benefits by showing results before they were convinced that it was the best way to go.

Convincing engineers to adopt a new approach required more than a mandate. Broadcom's platform team needed to demonstrate real, tangible improvements before teams would follow.

Solution

Broadcom's frontend architecture team had been working with Nx since its earliest days, having engaged directly with co-founders Victor Savkin and Jeff Cross to help refactor large JavaScript applications — making Nx a natural fit as it matured into a full platform.

• Consolidated multiple projects into a single, manageable monorepo

• Eliminated repetitive DevOps overhead for individual teams

• Standardized build and test workflows across the organization

• Adopted remote caching and intelligent task distribution through the Enterprise tier

• Demonstrated value incrementally, letting results drive adoption rather than mandates

Rather than forcing adoption, the platform team led by example — showing teams how the monorepo made their lives easier and allowed them to focus on building features instead of fighting infrastructure. The strategy worked: as teams joined the monorepo and experienced faster builds and simpler workflows, resistance gave way to buy-in. What began as one team's experiment became company-wide strategy.

The impact became measurable once remote caching and task distribution were in place:

• 361 days of computation saved every 30 days — nearly a year of compute saved monthly

• 70% cache hit rate, stable and consistent across the workspace

• 29-minute average CI times across 177 projects

• 2x speed improvement after enabling remote caching and task distribution

To make people more comfortable with the monorepo approach, I think you have to lead by example. You show them how you make their life easier and they can focus on real work—forget about DevOps, the hard way of building or running tests. They'll be happy and they follow you along.

Today, Broadcom's monorepo contains 177 projects and continues to grow, with additional applications slated to merge in.

Results

Nearly a year of compute saved every month

After adopting remote caching and intelligent task distribution through Nx Enterprise, Broadcom now saves 361 days of computation every 30 days. That's not an annual figure — it's monthly. At the scale of 177 projects, the cumulative effect of avoided redundant work compounds rapidly, freeing engineering capacity that would otherwise be consumed by infrastructure overhead.

CI times cut in half

Build times dropped by 2x following the rollout of remote caching and task distribution. Average CI times now sit at 29 minutes across the entire workspace — a consistent, predictable baseline that holds even as the monorepo continues to expand with new projects.

To me, Nx means the best developer experience I've had in my career. It's a tool that helps us be so much more productive and be better at our job.

A 70% cache hit rate across the workspace

A 70% cache hit rate means the majority of work across Broadcom's monorepo is never duplicated. This stability — consistent across teams and time — is a direct result of standardized tooling and the trust teams have built in the shared infrastructure. It also reflects how deeply the monorepo approach has been internalized across the organization.

An ongoing partnership at the cutting edge

Broadcom's relationship with Nx predates the platform itself, and that long-standing collaboration continues to pay dividends. Regular engagement with the Nx team keeps Broadcom positioned at the leading edge of what's possible — including maintaining consistent CI pipeline performance regardless of how much work is added to the system.