Anthropic quietly joins the race to build its own chips

Anthropic has opened early talks with Samsung Electronics to manufacture a custom AI chip, according to a report from Bloomberg.

The Claude developer has never built its own silicon before. It has relied entirely on chips rented from Amazon, Google, and Nvidia, and that dependence is now colliding with the soaring cost of running its largest models.

The conversations are still preliminary. Anthropic has not decided what the chip will do, how it will fit into a server, or how powerful it needs to be, according to TechCrunch.

Samsung declined to comment on the discussions when TechCrunch reached out.

Anthropic looks beyond Nvidia for its next chip

Anthropic currently depends on Amazon's Trainium chips, Google's Tensor Processing Units, and Nvidia's graphics processors to train and run its models.

A diversified hardware stack built on those three suppliers will remain central to its compute strategy, the company told TechCrunch. Nothing about the Samsung talks changes that today.

Nvidia controls about 74% of the global AI chip market, according to The Information. That level of concentration gives one company outsized influence over pricing across the industry.

Custom silicon, designed around a lab's own model architecture, offers one of the only ways around that math.

Anthropic is not moving first. OpenAI unveiled its own custom chip last month, an inference processor called Jalapeno built with Broadcom.

Anthropic's Samsung talks surfacing weeks later suggest the industry is quietly hedging against Nvidia dependence.

For investors, the read-through lands on the supply side, not on Anthropic itself. Anthropic remains privately held, so there is no direct way to buy into its chip strategy.

The companies that stand to gain or lose are the ones building the hardware underneath it.

Samsung brings more than manufacturing capacity to the table

Samsung is not a random choice for Anthropic. The company was one of three memory chipmakers, alongside SK Hynix and Micron, that invested in Anthropic's $65 billion funding round in May, according to Forbes.

Samsung is the only one of those three investors that also operates its own chip foundries.

Anthropic is specifically evaluating Samsung's two-nanometer manufacturing process and its advanced chip packaging facilities, according to The Information.

Winning a marquee AI client would give Samsung a showcase customer as it works to close the gap with Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing, the industry's dominant foundry.