Anthropic is in early talks with Samsung to build its own AI chip

incrementalDeveloperCompute

Friday, July 3, 2026

Confidence

Medium · — reported, unsigned, and unconfirmed by Anthropic

Evidence

The Information (original) + Bloomberg and TechCrunch corroboration; Anthropic declined to confirm

A third frontier lab is moving to design custom silicon and loosen Nvidia's grip on its cost structure — though the deal is unsigned and Anthropic won't confirm it.

The details

The Information reported that Anthropic has begun early-stage work on its own AI chip and held talks with Samsung as a manufacturing partner, eyeing Samsung's 2-nanometer process and advanced packaging; Anthropic hasn't yet decided the chip's use, power, or form factor, per TechCrunch.
Anthropic hired Clive Chan — the second engineer to join OpenAI's custom-chip team — in early June; Chan spent two and a half years building the Broadcom-designed inference accelerator OpenAI unveiled as "Jalapeño" on June 24, as Bloomberg noted.
Samsung was already a strategic investor in Anthropic's $65 billion Series H in May; Anthropic declined to confirm the talks, pointing instead to its existing chip stack with Nvidia, Google, and Amazon.

What it means

Read with story 05: the labs building on Nvidia now want their own inference silicon to route around its $3–4T bill. It is years away and unsigned, but the intent is unanimous. The variable to model: inference cost will move on the lab's timeline, not Nvidia's — so stress-test a 30% Claude price swing and name a fallback.

A third frontier lab is moving to design custom silicon and loosen Nvidia's grip on its cost structure — though the deal is unsigned and Anthropic won't confirm it.

The Information reported that Anthropic has begun early-stage work on its own AI chip and held talks with Samsung as a manufacturing partner, eyeing Samsung's 2-nanometer process and advanced packaging; Anthropic hasn't yet decided the chip's use, power, or form factor, per TechCrunch.
Anthropic hired Clive Chan — the second engineer to join OpenAI's custom-chip team — in early June; Chan spent two and a half years building the Broadcom-designed inference accelerator OpenAI unveiled as "Jalapeño" on June 24, as Bloomberg noted.
Samsung was already a strategic investor in Anthropic's $65 billion Series H in May; Anthropic declined to confirm the talks, pointing instead to its existing chip stack with Nvidia, Google, and Amazon.

Sources

Anthropic is in early talks with Samsung to build its own AI chip

Spot-Check Every Citation in a Brief Before Filing

Kimi K2.7 Code (in GitHub Copilot)