Anthropic in talks with Samsung over custom AI chip

Anthropic is in discussions with Samsung to explore a collaboration on a custom AI chip, according to a report by The Information. The talks build on earlier reports that the AI company was considering building its own hardware.

Reuters reported in April that Anthropic was weighing whether to produce its own AI chips as a way to address chip shortages. The Samsung discussions mark a more concrete step toward that goal, though Anthropic has not decided what the chip will be used for, how it will fit into server infrastructure, or how powerful it will be.

Anthropic told TechCrunch that a diversified hardware stack including chips from Google, Amazon, and Nvidia remains central to its compute strategy. The company said it had nothing further to add regarding a potential Samsung partnership. Several AI companies have pursued custom chip development, both to build hardware suited to specific compute tasks and to reduce reliance on Nvidia, which continues to dominate the chip industry.

The move follows a similar announcement last week from Anthropic's rival OpenAI, which partnered with Broadcom to unveil its own custom inference processor, named Jalapeno. OpenAI has said the chip delivers better performance per watt than competing chips. Amazon and Google already offer custom-built TPUs through their cloud platforms.

Samsung is already active in the AI chip space as a major partner of Nvidia, producing chips the company uses to train and run its AI models. Samsung also uses Nvidia's software in its own chip manufacturing. The two companies are building an AI chip factory in South Korea and have discussed a separate partnership involving Google's chip-making efforts.