For two years, the AI buildout has been a story about scarcity: not enough chips, not enough memory, not enough power. Broadcom CEO Hock Tan thinks we're watching the wrong shortage. The binding constraint, he said Monday, is money.

Speaking at DBS Bank's Asia Future Forward conference in Singapore, Tan argued that every shortage the industry has hit has eventually been overcome, and the current ones will be too. Memory could look "very different" a year from now; the wafer squeeze should ease by 2028; there's power available for anyone planning 2028–2029 builds.

It was DBS group CEO Tan Su Shan, moderating, who raised the pressure point: the rising cost of debt for hyperscalers after a jump in long bond yields. Hock agreed instantly. "The thing you hit on that I think might be the biggest constraint is capital," he said, according to Reuters. The labs will cope, he added — provided the revenue keeps coming. If Anthropic and OpenAI keep earning what they do from frontier models and coding and personal-assistant products: "They can afford to pay whatever coupons you like to charge."

That's a revealing conditional, because it turns the whole buildout into a bet on monetization, not manufacturing. Broadcom is already financing its own thesis: it's arranging more than $50 billion in debt to fund OpenAI's custom chip purchases, per the Wall Street Journal, while Anthropic's IPO filings describe a $42 billion facility from Broadcom toward a $125.2 billion, five-year compute deal.

Not everyone on the panel bought the frame. Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan, sharing the stage, agreed demand would outrun supply for years but said what actually trips the industry up will be memory, substrates, or power — "some correction is good," per Computer Weekly's fuller account of the session. But Tan's point is that those are cyclical problems the industry knows how to solve. You can build a new fab; you can't engineer away the coupon.

What to watch: Tan's conditional gets tested almost immediately. TSMC reports Q3 on Thursday (Oct 15) with profit expected up 65%, ASML reports Wednesday (Oct 14), and Anthropic's IPO is on the runway. If the revenue-growth narrative wobbles, the capital constraint stops being a theory and becomes the news.

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— via Reuters.