Anthropic in Early Talks With Samsung to Build Its First Custom AI Chip
Summary: Anthropic is in early-stage talks with Samsung to manufacture a custom AI chip using the chipmaker's advanced 2nm process — making it the second frontier AI lab after OpenAI to publicly pursue silicon independence.
Key Points
- Talks reported by TechCrunch and Bloomberg on July 2; chip design, target use case, and production volume are all undecided
- Samsung's 2nm process and advanced packaging (including HBM) are under consideration
- Samsung joined Anthropic's $65B Series H round in May as a strategic infrastructure partner, laying the groundwork for manufacturing discussions
- Anthropic hired Clive Chan in June — formerly the second hardware engineer on OpenAI's Jalapeno chip program
- Anthropic's existing diversified compute stack (Google TPUs, AWS Trainium, Nvidia GPUs) will continue in parallel
Why It Matters
With OpenAI unveiling its Broadcom-built Jalapeno chip this month, Anthropic is now signaling the same direction. For Samsung, landing Anthropic as a customer would be a high-profile win in its bid to challenge TSMC as the preferred fab for frontier AI workloads. The talks are still pre-design, but the AI chip independence race is clearly accelerating beyond the big cloud hyperscalers.