Broadcom (NASDAQ: AVGO) CEO Hock Tan told an audience in Singapore on October 12 that many AI investors behave like casino gamblers, saying they hold “extreme expectations” and often have no clue what they are actually investing in.

The remarks helped drag Asian chip stocks lower in Tuesday trading. His own company, meanwhile, is arranging billions of dollars in loans so its customers can keep buying the chips he suggests they barely understand.

Insiders flag a possible AI bubble

Speaking at an event in Singapore, Tan likened companies splurging on AI experiments to a child handed $10 of arcade tokens who burns through them in ten minutes without learning anything. He also questioned the economics of AI labs that are losing money, pointing out that OpenAI’s roughly $50 billion annualized revenue as of September shows demand but, with heavy training costs, says little about long-term profit.

The comments place Tan alongside a growing group of insiders who have flagged a possible AI bubble, including OpenAI’s Sam Altman, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos and Google’s Sundar Pichai — warnings that draw attention in part because they come from executives inside the industry rather than outside skeptics.

South Korea’s KOSPI took the hardest hit following the remarks, dropping more than 6% on Tuesday. Japan’s Nikkei 225 lost close to3%, with SK Hynix and Samsung leading the declines. NASDAQ futures also fell.

China’s memory chipmaker CXMT contributed to the decline as well. The company has been taking market share from Korean rivals, reaching 10% of global DRAM revenue in the second quarter of 2026, up from 4% a year earlier, and is now moving into LPDDR6 and NAND flash chips — deepening the pressure on the Korean memory makers that led the selloff.

Why Broadcom is financing its customers

The warning came even as Broadcom expects its AI chip revenue to grow about four times, from roughly $58 billion this fiscal year to $230 billion by fiscal 2028. In September, Broadcom reported $29.6 billion in revenue for the third quarter, up 86% from a year earlier. Its AI chip sales came in at $16.7 billion, up 221%.

Growth on that scale depends on large cloud companies and AI labs such as OpenAI. Broadcom is reportedly pursuing more than $50 billion to finance OpenAI’s custom processors. The company has promised to lend up to $42 billion, based on Anthropic’s computing capacity, and is also backing part of a $60 billion bank loan that should help Anthropic borrow money at lower cost. Taken together, the arrangements function as vendor financing: Broadcom’s growth targets rest partly on customers whose ability to buy depends on credit that Broadcom itself is helping arrange.

Broadcom and OpenAI’s ties run deep. The two signed a collaboration in 2025 to deploy 10 gigawatts of OpenAI-designed accelerators using Broadcom networking, with Tan calling it “a pivotal moment in the pursuit of artificial general intelligence.” The agreement made Broadcom a central partner in OpenAI’s push to build its own custom AI hardware. Broadcom’s quarterly AI chip disclosures and the progress of its financing deals with OpenAI and Anthropic now give the market concrete numbers to weigh against Tan’s caution.