Anthropic is in early talks with Samsung to manufacture its first custom AI chip on Samsung's most advanced 2-nanometer process, The Information reported Thursday.
The talks are early. Anthropic has not decided what the chip will do, how powerful it will be, or who will design it. The company has engaged several chip design firms and has not progressed to formal blueprinting or testing.
But the direction is unmistakable. The maker of Claude, valued at $965 billion after its $65 billion Series H round in May, is the second standalone frontier lab, after OpenAI, to start building its own silicon. OpenAI got there first with Jalapeño, the Broadcom-designed inference chip we covered in June. Now the pattern is repeating, and the chip market's biggest customers are turning into its newest competitors.
Why Inference Is the Target
Anthropic's chip conversations are reportedly about inference, not training. Inference is the unglamorous half of AI: the continuous, real-time work of serving model responses to millions of users. Training happens in bursts. Inference runs every second of every day, and it scales with revenue.
That math matters more for Anthropic than almost anyone. The company's run-rate revenue reportedly crossed $47 billion in May, up from about $1 billion in early 2025. Every dollar of that revenue carries a compute cost, and most of that compute is inference.
The hiring tells the same story. Anthropic brought on Clive Chan, who spent two and a half years at OpenAI building the Broadcom-designed accelerator that became Jalapeño. OpenAI says that chip runs its models at roughly half the cost of today's leading GPUs, with deployment targeted for the end of 2026. Anthropic just hired the playbook.
Korea Put a Price on the Story Overnight
Seoul showed how much money is riding on who makes AI chips. On Thursday, Korea's Kospi index fell 7.9% as the US chip selloff went global, and SK Hynix dropped nearly 15%, its worst single day in years.
Then came Friday. The Kospi snapped back 5.8% to close at 8,088, a move so fast the Korea Exchange triggered a buy-side trading curb at 1:47 in the afternoon. Samsung jumped 8.2%. SK Hynix rebounded 10.9%. Bargain hunters drove part of it. The Anthropic report drove the rest.
US markets are closed Friday for the Fourth of July, so American chip stocks have not voted yet. They fell for two straight sessions before the holiday. Monday's open is the test of whether the Asia rebound travels.
The Custom Silicon Scoreboard
Nvidia is the reason this story matters. The company is worth $4.7 trillion, trades at about 30 times trailing earnings, and converts 63 cents of every revenue dollar into profit. Those margins are exactly what customers designing their own inference chips are trying to escape. Nvidia held up better than the group Thursday, slipping 1.4%, but every custom chip announcement chips away at the same question: how long do its biggest customers keep paying full price?
Broadcom is the incumbent design partner. It co-developed Jalapeño in nine months and holds a reported 10-gigawatt commitment from OpenAI. If Anthropic picks Broadcom too, the custom silicon franchise gets a second mega-customer. The stock trades at 58 times trailing earnings and about 42 times EV/EBITDA, so a lot of that future is already priced in.
Marvell is the swing name. The other major custom chip designer fell about 10% Thursday after an 8% drop Wednesday, a hard unwind for a stock that has roughly quadrupled from its 52-week low and joined the S&P 500 in June. A downgrade this week argued the pricing cycle for custom AI silicon may have already peaked. A second $965 billion customer walking into the market is the strongest counterargument that thesis has faced.
What Samsung Would Win
Samsung needs this more than Anthropic does. TSMC controlled roughly 70% of global foundry revenue in recent industry data. Samsung held about 7%.
The gap is why Samsung has been discounting its way into advanced manufacturing. Its 2-nanometer yields have reportedly climbed past 60%, up from roughly 20% last year. It signed a $16.5 billion deal to build Tesla's next-generation AI6 chips. Its new fab in Taylor, Texas is nearing completion and is built for exactly this class of order.
An Anthropic contract would be the strongest outside validation yet that Samsung's 2-nanometer process is ready for frontier AI work. That is why Samsung rallied 8.2% on a report about talks that may go nowhere. The order book potential is that large.
What to Watch From Here
Three things decide whether this becomes real. First, whether the talks advance from conversations to blueprinting, the step OpenAI and Broadcom cleared in nine months. Second, who gets the design contract. Broadcom, Marvell, and an in-house route are all live possibilities, and the winner books years of revenue. Third, Monday's US open. Chip stocks fell two straight days into the holiday, Asia bought the dip, and the reopen tells us which side American money takes.
The bigger picture does not need the talks to close. Two of the most valuable AI companies on the planet are now designing away from the GPU. The labs spent three years as the chip industry's best customers. They are becoming its business plan.
