Anthropic wants its own chip — and Samsung might build it

Anthropic is joining the custom-silicon rush. Per The Information, it's held early talks with Samsung to manufacture its first in-house AI chip — eyeing Samsung's 2nm process and advanced packaging. It's genuinely nascent: Anthropic reportedly hasn't even locked down what the chip should do, how powerful it should be, or how it slots into a server. The deal may never happen.

Still, the signals are loud. Anthropic recently hired Clive Chan, an early member of OpenAI's custom-chip team, and Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron all pitched into its $65B May raise — a natural on-ramp to a foundry deal. It lands days after OpenAI unveiled its own Broadcom-built chip.

Everyone's going full stack. Google, Amazon, Meta, and Microsoft already run proprietary silicon to escape Nvidia's pricing and supply crunch. Now the pure-play labs want off the merry-go-round too — owning the metal is fast becoming table stakes for frontier AI.

Why it matters: control your chips, control your compute costs — and the labs that don't could get squeezed out of the scaling race.