Anthropic in Talks with Samsung About Custom AI Chip
AI company Anthropic has entered discussions with Samsung to develop a custom chip, aiming to reduce dependence on Nvidia and address chip shortages, according to a report from The Information.
Anthropic, the AI company behind the Claude model, is in talks with Samsung about a potential collaboration to develop a custom chip, The Information reported on Thursday. This follows a Reuters report in April that Anthropic was considering producing its own AI chips to address supply chain constraints.
According to sources, Anthropic has not yet decided on the chip's specific use case, how it would fit into server architecture, or its performance target. In a comment to TechCrunch, Anthropic stated that a diversified hardware stack—including chips from Google, Amazon, and Nvidia—remains central to its compute strategy. The company declined to elaborate further on the potential Samsung partnership.
Several AI companies are developing custom chips both to create specialized hardware for specific tasks and to gain some independence from Nvidia, the undisputed leader in the chip industry. Anthropic's move also follows last week's announcement by key competitor OpenAI, which unveiled its own custom inference processor, codenamed “Jalapeño,” developed with Broadcom. OpenAI claims the chip offers better performance per watt than competing products.
Amazon and Google already offer custom TPUs as part of their cloud platforms. Samsung is deeply embedded in the AI industry, serving as a major partner to Nvidia by producing chips needed for training and running AI models, while using Nvidia's software for its own chip manufacturing. The two companies are jointly building an AI chip factory in South Korea. Samsung has also discussed collaborating with Google on chip production.
