Anthropic is in early-stage talks with Samsung Electronics to manufacture a custom AI accelerator chip, The Information reported on July 2, 2026, with no final design, target workload, or performance specs yet decided. Samsung's advanced 2-nanometer SF2P process and in-house HBM memory production make it a plausible manufacturing partner, and reporting notes Anthropic recently hired Clive Chan, an engineer who previously worked on OpenAI's custom silicon effort, as a sign the project has moved past pure exploration. Anthropic told TechCrunch its existing hardware stack, including chips from Amazon, Google, and Nvidia, "will continue to be pivotal to its compute strategy." The talks follow OpenAI's own custom inference chip, Jalapeno, built with Broadcom, underscoring an industry-wide push by AI labs to reduce Nvidia dependence.
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