Broadcom's Hock Tan: Capital, Not Chips, May Be AI's Biggest Constraint; Many Investors Are 'in a Casino'

The supplier of AI's custom chips is telling investors that chips are no longer the main problem. Broadcom CEO Hock Tan said on Monday, October 12, that the cost of capital may now be the biggest constraint on the AI build-out, speaking at DBS Bank's first Asia Future Forward Conference in Singapore, Computer Weekly reports.

Capital, not chips

DBS chief executive Tan Su Shan, moderating, raised the rising cost of debt for hyperscalers after a jump in long bond yields. Hock agreed: "The thing you hit on that I think might be the biggest constraint is capital." Every shortage of the past two years has been overcome, he said; the wafer squeeze should ease by 2028. He expects demand to outstrip supply for about two years, possibly into 2029 or 2030 if adoption keeps pace.

His token arithmetic

Using OpenRouter inference-throughput data, Hock estimated the world spends about $200 billion a year generating tokens against about $150 billion in revenue, Computer Weekly reports. By his numbers, frontier labs turn roughly $100 billion of spending into $120 billion of revenue, while open-weight providers spend about the same for about $30 billion back. Most enterprise buyers have yet to see a return: "people are just wasting money, spending tokens, trying to understand."

He put Anthropic at about $65 billion of annualised revenue on less than 2.5 GW of compute. That is his estimate, not an Anthropic disclosure.

"Casino gambling"

The remarks came the same day Korea's KOSPI fell 3.65% as Samsung and SK hynix slid, with one analyst citing AI-bubble worries after the OpenAI revenue reports.

Hock dismissed reports that OpenAI's revenue was lower than it had signalled. "A lot of investors have no clue what they're investing in, but set very extreme expectations, only to find out that it's almost like they are in a casino gambling," he said. Around $50 billion of annualised revenue in September, the figure OpenAI reportedly gave investors, is not bad for a startup, in his view. Bloomberg ran the casino line as its headline. We covered those revenue reports in our OpenAI annualized revenue piece.

Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan, on the same panel, said "we don't see any slowdown" and "in some way, some correction is good." He added that frontier model companies are asking Intel for more CPUs for inference orchestration and reinforcement learning.

Limits

• All revenue and spending figures are Hock Tan's back-of-envelope estimates, not audited data.
• Bloomberg's article is paywalled; only its headline was seen. Quotes come from Computer Weekly.

Sources

• Computer Weekly: Capital, not chips, may be the real brake on the AI build-out (October 12, 2026)
• Bloomberg: Broadcom CEO Likens Many AI Investors to Casino Gamblers (October 12, 2026; headline only, paywalled)
• Times of AI: OpenAI annualized revenue reports
• The Korea Times: KOSPI plunges 3.65% despite Samsung's record earnings (October 12, 2026)
• Times of AI: KOSPI Falls 3.65% as Samsung and SK Hynix Slide