AIBRIEF
SK Group chairman disclosed the request on stage with Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, framing the AI lab's push into custom silicon as a new kind of chip customer.
On a San Francisco stage with Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei seated beside him, SK Group Chairman Chey Tae Won said on July 25 that Anthropic has asked SK Hynix, his conglomerate's memory-chip arm, to supply chips for the AI lab's own semiconductors.
The request, disclosed at a public AI event during South Korean President Lee Jae Myung's Silicon Valley summit, points to a shift that has been building under the AI build-out: frontier model labs are starting to act as chip customers with their own silicon roadmaps, not just GPU buyers.
SK Hynix is the world's largest maker of high-bandwidth memory, the stacked DRAM that sits next to AI accelerators and feeds them data. Demand for that memory, and for the advanced packaging that stacks it, is the constraint moving into focus as compute supply eases.
"An AI company wanting to have its own chips, that's quite remarkable," Chey said on stage, sitting alongside Amodei. He did not announce a deal, and Anthropic has not confirmed the procurement publicly. There is no product type, volume, pricing, or timeline in the public record.
The disclosure landed in a crowded news cycle. Nvidia separately announced deals with Naver and SK Group during the same presidential visit, which could crowd out a single procurement conversation. But the mechanism it points to, labs buying their way into memory and packaging supply, is the layer most GPU-led coverage skips.