Anthropic is in early-stage talks with Samsung Electronics to manufacture a custom AI chip using Samsung Foundry's 2-nanometer process, according to The Information. The Claude developer joins a growing list of AI companies designing their own silicon, a trend that accelerated last month when rival OpenAI unveiled its "Jalapeño" inference chip.
Anthropic has hired Clive Chan, an early member of OpenAI's custom chip team, to lead the effort. The company has not finalized what the chip will do, how it will fit into servers, or its performance targets, per the report.
Discussions with Samsung may not proceed, but the hiring signals commitment. The 2nm manufacturing process would be the most advanced node available, offering better power efficiency through higher processor integration density. Samsung's advanced packaging capabilities would narrow the distance between the main processor and memory chips, boosting data transfer speeds.
Anthropic confirmed to TechCrunch that a diversified hardware stack including chips from Google, Amazon, and Nvidia will remain central to its compute strategy. The company declined to comment on the Samsung talks.
The move follows a broader industry pivot. OpenAI's Jalapeño chip, built with Broadcom and manufactured by TSMC, is designed for inference workloads and will stay inside OpenAI's infrastructure.
Google trained Gemini on its in-house TPUs. Amazon launched Trainium in December 2024.
Microsoft commercialized its Maia AI chip in January, and Meta unveiled four chip prototypes in March. The economics driving this shift are straightforward. Training advanced models demands massive compute, but serving millions of daily user queries is even more expensive.
Every AI response burns processing power. Custom chips optimized for a company's own models can slash those costs.
Anthropic signaled its hardware ambitions in May when Samsung Electronics, SK hynix, and Micron joined its Series H funding round as investors. Anthropic called the three chipmakers "strategic infrastructure partners whose technologies play a critical role in the world's supply of memory, storage and logic chips." Samsung is the only one of the three with a foundry business capable of manufacturing logic semiconductors.
The price of entry is steep. "Chip design alone costs at least 500 billion won ($327 million)," an official at a Korean chipmaker told the Korea JoongAng Daily.
"There is no guarantee of when the development will be completed."
If Samsung lands the Anthropic order, it would add another Big Tech client to a roster that already includes Tesla, Nvidia, and Apple. News of the potential deal drove Samsung's stock up 8.22% on the Seoul exchange as investors bet on the foundry winning a flagship Silicon Valley customer to challenge TSMC's global dominance.
