Early stage talks, first reported by The Information and independently confirmed by Bloomberg, follow OpenAI's June 24 unveiling of a custom AI chip built with Broadcom, putting Anthropic in line as the second frontier lab now exploring bespoke silicon.
Anthropic is in early-stage talks with Samsung to build a custom AI chip, a scoping-stage conversation that, if it advances, would mark the second confirmed frontier AI lab moving toward bespoke silicon to reduce dependence on Nvidia.
The discussions, first reported by The Information on July 2 and independently confirmed by Bloomberg the same day, are explicitly exploratory. Anthropic has not decided what the chip would do, which server workload it would target, or how it would fit into its compute stack, according to TechCrunch's relay of the original reporting.
Anthropic's official response narrowed rather than expanded the picture. The company told TechCrunch that a diversified hardware portfolio spanning Google, Amazon, and Nvidia would "continue to be pivotal" to its compute strategy, and on Samsung said it had "nothing further to add." That posture is consistent with April reporting from Reuters that Anthropic was weighing whether to design its own chips in response to industry-wide supply constraints.
The timing places Anthropic one month behind OpenAI, which unveiled its first custom AI chip, built with Broadcom, on June 24. That chip, internally nicknamed Jalapeño, is a custom AI processor. It set the template the Anthropic talks now echo: pair a hyperscale model lab with a non-Nvidia silicon vendor to produce hardware tuned for a specific stage of the AI pipeline.
Why this matters is the pattern, not the partnership. Google has built its Tensor Processing Units (TPUs), Amazon has built Trainium and Inferentia, and Meta has invested in its MTIA accelerators. Each of those efforts shares a common logic: own a portion of the compute stack, tune chips for specific workloads, and reduce exposure to Nvidia's roadmap and pricing. Reporting from Yahoo Finance and The Information flags Samsung's 2-nanometer fabrication process as the likely manufacturing target for any Anthropic chip, which would put Anthropic in direct competition with Nvidia and other AI customers for Samsung's most advanced foundry capacity.
Samsung is a credible partner for Anthropic not just because of its foundry capability, but because of its existing role in the AI chip supply chain. Nvidia has relied on Samsung for chip packaging in past generations, and Samsung has been working to position its foundry business as a credible alternative to Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) for advanced AI processors. CryptoBriefing's roundup of the talks frames Samsung as a foundry contender angling for a piece of the AI silicon market that has historically flowed to TSMC.
The falsifier is straightforward. If Anthropic quietly drops the Samsung conversations over the coming quarters, or scales them down to a non-binding research agreement, the pattern thesis weakens and the story reads as one more lab that flirted with custom silicon and walked away. If the talks mature into a publicly disclosed multi-year wafer commitment with named workload targets, the thesis hardens: custom inference silicon has moved from a Google-shaped exception to a default item on every frontier lab's strategic checklist.
Until then, the right way to read this is as a beat update with structural implications. Anthropic joins OpenAI on a specific path: scoping conversations with a non-Nvidia fabrication partner about chips that, if they exist, will run AI workloads the labs themselves get to define. The deal is not done. The direction is.