Anthropic Is Discussing a New Custom Chip with Samsung

What happened

Anthropic has begun early-stage discussions with Samsung Electronics about manufacturing a custom AI inference chip using Samsung's 2nm process and advanced packaging. According to Bloomberg and TechCrunch, these talks are nascent — no design or manufacturing work has started, and Anthropic may not proceed.

Context and impact

Anthropic recently hired Clive Chan, an early member of OpenAI's chip team, signaling a long-term hardware ambition. A proprietary chip would reduce Nvidia dependency and allow optimization for Claude's specific inference workloads. Google (TPU), Amazon (Trainium), Meta (MTIA), and OpenAI (Jalapeño) have all pursued custom silicon.

Details

• Talks focus on Samsung's 2nm node and advanced chip packaging
• No design or manufacturing work has started yet
• Existing partnerships with AWS Trainium, Google TPUs, and Nvidia GPUs remain active
• Anthropic recently hired Clive Chan — an early member of OpenAI's chip team