ANTHROPIC APPROACHES SAMSUNG FOR SECRET CUSTOM CHIP DEAL AS AI ARMS RACE MOVES TO SILICON Anthropic is in early talks with Samsung to develop a custom AI chip, a move that puts the Claude maker directly into the hardware race and signals that every major AI lab is now trying to escape dependence on Nvidia. The Information broke the story Thursday. According to the report, the conversations are still early enough that Anthropic has not decided what the chip will be used for, what form factor it will take inside a server, or how powerful it needs to be. Anthropic confirmed to TechCrunch only that it has nothing further to add on the topic, while pointing to its existing partnerships with Google, Amazon, and Nvidia as core to its compute strategy. The timing is not accidental. One week ago, OpenAI unveiled Jalapeño, its own custom inference processor built in partnership with Broadcom, which the company claims delivers better performance per watt than any competitor chip. Anthropic is watching that move and responding. Samsung is already embedded in the AI hardware ecosystem as a major Nvidia partner, producing memory and logic chips for AI training and inference. The two companies are also jointly building an AI chip factory in South Korea. A Samsung partnership would give Anthropic a path to manufacturing that does not run through TSMC, which is approaching capacity limits as every tech company on earth tries to book more advanced production slots at the same time. Keywords: Anthropic Samsung chip, custom AI silicon, OpenAI Broadcom Jalapeno, AI chip independence