Anthropic early talks Samsung manufacture first custom AI chip 2nm process
Anthropic is in early talks with Samsung to manufacture its first custom AI chip on the 2nm process, per TechCrunch. Samsung invested in Anthropic's May funding round. A second frontier lab designing its own silicon is a direct run at Nvidia $NVDA margins on AI compute.
Anthropic has started early work on its first custom AI chip and is in talks with Samsung as a potential manufacturing partner, as reported by TechCrunch and UPI. The discussions center on Samsung's 2nm process node and its advanced packaging capacity. Anthropic recently hired Clive Chan, one of the earliest engineers on OpenAI's custom chip team, and Samsung participated in Anthropic's 65 billion dollar funding round in May 2026 as a strategic infrastructure partner. The move follows OpenAI's inference processor built with Broadcom $AVGO, and it fits a broader pattern: the largest AI labs are trying to control the economics of their own compute rather than paying Nvidia $NVDA margins on every training and inference cycle. For Samsung the stakes are just as high. Its foundry business has trailed TSMC $TSM in advanced-node market share for years, and a frontier AI lab as an anchor customer for 2nm would be the strongest validation the process has had. The project is early. Anthropic is reportedly still defining what the processor should do and how it fits into a server, which means volume production is years away even if the talks succeed. But the direction is unambiguous: every frontier lab either has a custom silicon program or is starting one, and the foundries that win those contracts will shape who can afford frontier-scale AI.