Broadcom CEO Hock Tan, whose company sells custom AI chips to the biggest model makers, said many AI investors set "very extreme expectations only to find out that it's almost like they are in a casino," according to Bloomberg's account of his remarks in Singapore on Monday.
"A lot of investors have no clue what they are investing in," Tan said, as quoted in reports citing Bloomberg. He spoke on a panel with Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan at DBS's first Asia Future Forward Conference, moderated by DBS CEO Tan Su Shan, The Straits Times reported.
The remark came up when OpenAI's valuation did, according to Hong Kong's The Standard. It reported that Tan "rejected the idea that it is overvalued" and instead "blamed investors for setting extreme expectations without understanding the technology." The Standard quoted him: "It's almost like they are in a casino gambling." The Standard's headline says OpenAI "is not overvalued," but no outlet quotes Tan using those words.
Tan was bullish on demand. "There is more demand for compute infrastructure than we can supply," he said, according to CNBC, and The Straits Times quoted him saying it "would probably continue till 2029 and probably into 2030." The bigger risk, he told the audience, per CNBC: "[What] I think might be the biggest constraint is capital."
His comments land days after the Financial Times reported OpenAI's annualized revenue was approaching $50 billion, about $20 billion below an earlier investor-built estimate. TipRanks reported that Tan noted OpenAI is still losing money on training costs.
Asked what he might have gotten wrong, Tan said, per The Straits Times: "I think we've probably got everything wrong."
The warning matters because it comes from one of the AI boom's biggest suppliers: if investors are pricing frontier labs on hope rather than understanding, Broadcom's own customers are the ones exposed when expectations reset.