Broadcom's CEO Says AI Demand Isn't Slowing Down — Even As He Names Anthropic as Proof It Might
While the AI industry argued over whether to hit the brakes, Broadcom's CEO went on CNBC and said his order book tells a different story.
On September 15, Hock Tan pushed back directly against the market panic that followed Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei's weekend essay calling for AI labs to "pace the frontier."
Here's the full picture:
→ Broadcom stock fell 4.8% and the broader chip-sector ETF dropped 5.6% on Monday after Amodei's essay — with Sam Altman and Elon Musk publicly backing the call to slow down
→ Asked point-blank if anything about the slowdown debate changed Broadcom's forecasts, Tan's answer was: "No, not in the least"
→ Broadcom is holding firm on $115 billion in AI semiconductor revenue for fiscal 2027, doubling to $230 billion in fiscal 2028
→ Tan singled out inference — the everyday, post-training usage of AI models — as the area he's most confident will "continue to be very, very strong"
→ In the same breath, Tan revealed something that explains exactly why investors reacted so hard to Amodei's essay: Anthropic itself is on track to become Broadcom's single largest custom-chip customer by 2027, overtaking even Google, and holding that spot through 2028
There's a real irony sitting at the center of this story. The same company whose CEO is publicly urging the industry to slow down is, according to Broadcom's own numbers, one of the biggest drivers of the chip demand that "slowdown" would supposedly affect. That's not a contradiction so much as a signal of how layered this debate actually is — a lab can genuinely believe capability growth needs guardrails while its own infrastructure spending keeps compounding, because inference and safety research still need compute, even if frontier-model races get paced.
For anyone watching AI infrastructure stocks: Tan's message was clear — the safety conversation and the compute-demand curve aren't moving in the same direction, at least not yet. Read too much into a one-day selloff, and you'll miss the deal that's still quietly getting bigger underneath it.
Do you think the market can keep pricing "shipping numbers" and "safety warnings" as separate stories much longer — or is a correction on the way?
#Broadcom #Anthropic #AIChips #Semiconductors #AIInfrastructure #TechNews #HockTan
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