Broadcom's and Intel's CEOs Said Capital, Not Chips, May Be AI's Biggest Constraint — and Broadcom Already Backstops a $35 Billion Deal That Buys Its Own Chips

On Monday, Oct 12, 2026, at DBS's Asia Future Forward conference in Singapore, Broadcom CEO Hock Tan said the biggest constraint on the AI buildout may be capital rather than chips, memory or power, while also saying demand for compute infrastructure exceeds what the industry can supply and could keep doing so through 2029 and possibly into 2030. Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan, on the same stage, named capital and the cost of capital as the immediate challenge and said the market will in the long run want to see real returns on AI spending. The catch is that Broadcom already helps its buyers pay: in June it set up the AI XPV platform with Apollo and Blackstone, whose first $35 billion financing buys Broadcom chips that are leased to Anthropic, and Broadcom's own 10-Q discloses a backstop of the customer's lease obligations. Intel closed down 3.2% and Broadcom 1.9% that day, but Micron fell 3.9% and Nvidia 1.3% in a broad sell-off in memory and chip stocks the same session, so no single cause explains the moves.