TL;DR
Anthropic is discussing a custom AI chip with Samsung, although the project is in an early stage and no design has been finalized.
Anthropic is in talks with Samsung Electronics to explore manufacturing a custom AI chip. The information reported on Thursday. The project is still in an early stage and Anthropic has not yet decided what the chip would be used for, how powerful it would be or how it would fit into a server, according to the report. The company could still abandon the effort entirely.
When asked for comment, Anthropic told TechCrunch that a diversified hardware stack that includes chips from Google, Amazon and Nvidia will remain central to its computing strategy, and said it had nothing further to add to Samsung’s discussions. Samsung already plays an important role in the AI chip supply chain as a major manufacturing partner of Nvidia. producing chips that power AI inference and training workloads. The two companies are also building an AI chip factory together in South Korea.
The talks follow a Reuters report in April that Anthropic was exploring the idea of building its own chips. as Claude’s IT demands exceeded the available supply. At the time, the effort was described as preliminary, with no dedicated team or commitment to a specific design. What has changed since April is that Anthropic hired Clive Chan, who previously helped build OpenAI’s custom chip program, a sign that the company is moving from exploration to active development.
The timing also coincides with a move by Anthropic’s main competitor. Last week, OpenAI unveiled its first custom chip, an inference processor built by Broadcom that it calls “intelligence processor,” designed to reduce the company’s dependence on Nvidia hardware. Amazon and Google already offer their own custom silicon through their cloud platforms, and Anthropic currently runs Claude on all three chip families.
Anthropic’s annualized revenue rate surpassed $30 billion earlier this year, more than tripling to roughly $9 billion by the end of 2025, a growth rate that makes the custom silicon economy increasingly attractive. The company signed a long-term deal with Google and Broadcom in April for about three and a half gigawatts of TPU computing starting in 2027, but designing its own chips would give it an extra layer of control over the hardware that runs its models. Whether Samsung or another manufacturer eventually builds a chip for Anthropic remains an open question, but the direction the industry will take, away from complete dependence on Nvidia, is now unmistakable.
