Anthropic Asked SK Hynix for Chip Component Supplies to Build Its Own Semiconductors

What happened

SK Group Chairman Chey Tae Won disclosed on July 25 that Anthropic has approached SK Hynix — one of the world's largest memory chip manufacturers — for component supplies as part of its push to design and produce its own AI chips.

Context and impact

Anthopic is following the playbook of OpenAI (Jalapeño chip with Broadcom) and Google (TPU) to reduce dependence on Nvidia GPUs. SK Hynix dominates the HBM3E memory market, which is essential for modern AI accelerators. Direct supply relationships would give Anthropic greater control over inference efficiency and cost.

Details

• SK Hynix dominates the HBM (High Bandwidth Memory) market — their chips power Nvidia H100/H200 and AMD Instinct
• Anthropic has primarily relied on AWS cloud infrastructure (Amazon invested $4B)
• OpenAI unveiled its Jalapeño inference chip with Broadcom earlier in 2026
• Custom chips would allow Anthropic to optimize hardware directly for Claude model architecture