How Anthropic Is Building Its Own AI Chip — and Why Samsung Wants In

Anthropic, the company behind the Claude AI model, is laying the groundwork to design its own custom AI chips — a move that could reshape its relationship with Nvidia, Amazon, Google, and the entire semiconductor supply chain. A series of developments in mid-2026, from a key hire to exploratory foundry talks to a record-breaking funding round, reveal the contours of its silicon strategy.

Anthropic's Custom AI Chip: Early-Stage Samsung 2nm Talks

Anthropic has begun early-stage work on designing its own custom AI chip and has held talks with Samsung Electronics as a potential manufacturing partner. According to a July 2, 2026, report from The Information (covered by Yahoo Finance and others), the discussions focus on Samsung's cutting-edge 2-nanometer (SF2) process technology and its advanced packaging capabilities — Samsung's bundled strengths in logic, memory, and packaging being a key differentiator . The talks are described as exploratory and preliminary, with no finalized deal . No detailed chip design or manufacturing timeline has been disclosed.

Strategic Hire of Clive Chan from OpenAI's Chip Program

On June 7, 2026, Clive Chan — OpenAI's second hardware hire and a core member of its in-house custom chip program — announced his departure from OpenAI and immediate move to Anthropic . He joined as a Member of Technical Staff, bringing:

• 2.4 years of custom ASIC experience at OpenAI, where he worked on the OpenAI-Broadcom chip partnership .
• Prior experience on Tesla's Autopilot ASIC team .

Chan posted on X that he was "proud to have been part of the custom chip program" and joined Anthropic because he was "deeply impressed with the team's talent, values, and ambition. It's time to build" . The hire signals Anthropic's intention to build internal silicon design capability as it moves beyond purely buying third-party compute .

Multi-Vendor Compute Strategy: AWS Trainium + Google TPUs + Nvidia GPUs

Anthropic explicitly describes its approach as a multi-platform, multi-cloud strategy — the only frontier AI company that runs its models across three silicon families simultaneously .

Silicon Platform	Scale / Key Deal
AWS Trainium	Anthropic's largest training cluster is 500,000 Trainium2 chips, with zero Nvidia GPUs in that cluster . Amazon's Project Rainier in Indiana (~1M Trainium2 across campuses) . AWS Trainium3 on 3nm launched at re:Invent 2025 .
Google TPUs	Expanded partnership with Google and Broadcom: ~$21B deal for next-gen TPU Ironwood chips. 1M+ TPU chips / 1GW+ by end of 2026, scaling to 3.5GW by 2027 . TPU Ironwood delivers 52% better power efficiency than Nvidia GPUs .
Nvidia GPUs	~$30B agreement with Nvidia and Microsoft for 1GW of Nvidia GPU compute .

Anthropic's official statement: "We train and run Claude on a range of AI hardware — AWS Trainium, Google TPUs, and NVIDIA GPUs… Claude remains the only frontier AI model available to customers on all three of the world's largest cloud platforms" . This diversification reduces single-supplier dependence on Nvidia and creates cost/performance leverage across vendors .

Samsung's Foundry Revival Ambitions & Strategic Investment in Series H

Samsung Foundry's Push

Samsung Foundry is mounting a significant comeback bid, leveraging its combined logic, memory, and advanced packaging strengths to win AI custom-chip customers amid tight TSMC capacity . Samsung's roadmap includes:

• Gate-All-Around (GAA) transistor architecture and Backside Power Delivery Network (BSPDN) at sub-2nm nodes .
• Aggressive ramp of 2nm and 3nm production targeting AI/HPC demand .
• Already working with Nvidia on autonomous driving AI chips .

Samsung's Stake in Anthropic's $65B Series H

On May 28, 2026, Anthropic closed a $65 billion Series H at a $965 billion post-money valuation — one of the largest private fundraising rounds in history, positioning Anthropic for a potential IPO . The round was co-led by Altimeter Capital, Dragoneer, Greenoaks, Sequoia Capital, Capital Group, Coatue, and others .

Samsung Electronics (along with SK Hynix) took strategic equity stakes in Anthropic as part of this round, investing "trillions of won" . The Korea Herald and others frame this as a move by Korean memory/logic chipmakers to cement themselves as key partners in the AI infrastructure stack — pairing equity ownership with potential foundry and memory supply relationships .

Broader Competitive Landscape: AI Companies Exploring Samsung Foundry

Samsung Foundry is actively courting multiple AI chip customers beyond Anthropic:

• Nvidia — already working with Samsung on autonomous driving AI chips using Samsung's foundry .
• Google — reportedly in talks with Samsung to manufacture part of an upcoming Tensor Processing Unit codenamed "Icefish." The main computing component would still be fabbed at TSMC, but Samsung could handle secondary components . This would be a notable diversification of Google's TPU supply chain.
• OpenAI — known to be exploring or already working with Samsung's foundry for custom AI silicon alongside its Broadcom partnership, though details are less publicly confirmed.
• Undisclosed AI chip customer — Samsung announced a 2nm AI chip deal with an undisclosed company paired with HBM3 memory, an early win for the 2nm node .

The broader driver: TSMC's capacity tightness is giving global tech customers strong incentive to qualify Samsung as a second foundry source, accelerating Samsung's rebound in advanced logic .

Key Takeaway

Anthropic is building toward full vertical integration in silicon — poaching OpenAI's lead chip engineer (June 7), holding exploratory talks with Samsung about 2nm manufacturing (reported July 2), and simultaneously running the industry's most diversified compute strategy across AWS, Google, and Nvidia. Samsung's equity stake in Anthropic's Series H creates a direct financial alignment alongside the foundry discussions. The trend mirrors a broader industry move: OpenAI, Google, Meta, and others are all exploring or already using Samsung as a TSMC alternative for custom AI silicon.