Anthropic is in early-stage talks with Samsung Electronics to manufacture a custom artificial intelligence chip, joining a growing list of AI companies seeking hardware independence from Nvidia.
According to The Information, Anthropic has approached Samsung about collaborating on a custom chip, though the company has not yet decided on the chip's specifications, use case, or server integration. The potential partnership would leverage Samsung's advanced 2nm foundry technology.
The discussions come just one week after OpenAI announced its own custom-built inference processor, code-named 'Jalapeño,' developed in partnership with Broadcom. OpenAI claims the chip delivers better performance-per-watt than competitor offerings.
Samsung is already deeply embedded in the AI industry as a major Nvidia partner, producing memory and other chips essential for training and running AI models. The two companies are jointly building an AI chip factory in South Korea. Samsung has also discussed chip-making partnerships with Google.
A diversified hardware stack — including chips from Google, Amazon, and Nvidia — will continue to be pivotal to Anthropic's compute strategy, the company told TechCrunch, while declining to comment specifically on the Samsung partnership.
Anthropic had first signaled interest in developing its own chips back in April, when Reuters reported the company was exploring chip production as a response to AI chip shortages and the high costs of relying on third-party hardware.
