TL;DR
Anthropic is discussing a custom AI chip with Samsung, though the project is 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 remains at 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 including chips from Google, Amazon, and Nvidia will continue to be central to its compute strategy, and said it had nothing further to add on the Samsung discussions. Samsung already plays a significant role in the AI chip supply chain as a major manufacturing partner for Nvidia, producing chips that power AI training and inference 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 compute demands outpaced available supply. At the time, the effort was described as preliminary, with no dedicated team assembled and no commitment to a specific design. What has changed since April is that Anthropic has hired Clive Chan, who previously helped build OpenAI’s custom chip programme, a signal 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, a Broadcom-built inference processor it calls the “Intelligence Processor,” designed to reduce the company’s dependence on Nvidia hardware. Amazon and Google both already offer their own custom silicon through their cloud platforms, and Anthropic currently runs Claude across all three chip families.
Anthropic’s annualized revenue run rate surpassed 30 billion dollars earlier this year, more than tripling from roughly nine billion dollars at the end of 2025, a growth rate that makes the economics of custom silicon increasingly attractive. The company signed a long-term deal with Google and Broadcom in April for roughly three and a half gigawatts of TPU compute starting in 2027, but designing its own chips would give it an additional layer of control over the hardware that runs its models. Whether Samsung or another manufacturer ultimately builds a chip for Anthropic remains an open question, but the direction of travel across the industry, away from total reliance on Nvidia, is now unmistakable.
