Broadcom CEO Reaffirms AI Revenue Targets, Says Compute Demand Strong

Broadcom CEO Hock Tan on Monday pushed back against concerns of a slowdown in AI infrastructure demand, saying compute demand remains strong for both frontier model training and inference workloads.

The comments came after Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei published an essay arguing for a more moderate pace in large model development, a view echoed by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Elon Musk. Broadcom shares fell 4.8% on Monday, while the iShares Semiconductor ETF dropped 5.6% as investors reassessed compute demand prospects.

Tan reaffirmed the company's forecasts of $115 billion in AI semiconductor revenue for fiscal 2027 and $230 billion for fiscal 2028, first outlined during the company's September 2 earnings call. He also said Anthropic is on track to become Broadcom's largest custom chip customer in 2027 and remain so in 2028. Broadcom's AI business includes custom accelerators and networking chips for AI systems.

Tan expressed particular optimism about inference demand, saying it will be extremely strong as AI products move into real-world deployment. He agreed AI needs governance and safeguards, but described it as a tool rather than a living thing, and emphasized its potential to boost productivity and raise living standards.