Anthropic Explores AI Chip Collaboration with Samsung, Fueled by Industry Trends

Anthropic is in early-stage talks with Samsung Electronics to manufacture a custom AI chip on Samsung's 2-nanometer process, according to multiple reports. The discussions remain preliminary: Anthropic has not yet decided what the chip would be used for, how it would fit into its server infrastructure, or how powerful it needs to be, and no prototype or manufacturing timeline currently exists .

The overture follows Samsung's participation, alongside SK Hynix and Micron, in Anthropic's $65 billion Series H round in May, where the three chipmakers were named strategic infrastructure partners for the world's supply of memory, storage, and logic chips . Anthropic has since hired an engineer from OpenAI's custom chip program to bolster its semiconductor efforts . Samsung's interest also appears tied to a separate setback: its own custom inference-chip project for OpenAI, an ARM-based neural processing unit in development since 2024, has reportedly cooled over strategic differences between the two companies, leaving Samsung short a marquee customer for its 2-nanometer capacity .

The talks surface as semiconductor stocks broadly sold off amid a market downturn, underscoring how AI infrastructure buildout has decoupled from near-term chip-sector sentiment. Samsung's foundry ambitions extend further: the company is separately negotiating a roughly $6.5 billion deal to manufacture Meta Platforms' next-generation MTIA accelerator on the same 2-nanometer node. Taken together, the two negotiations point to a broader pattern of AI developers courting custom silicon to diversify away from Nvidia, even as its GPUs remain the near-term foundation of computing strategy at labs including Anthropic .

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