Anthropic is discussing a new custom chip with Samsung

Back in April, Reuters reported that Anthropic was toying with the idea of producing its own AI chips as a means of responding to chip shortages. Now, it would appear that the company is getting serious about this idea.

On Thursday, The Information reported that Anthropic was in contact with Samsung to explore a collaboration around the pending chip. However, Anthropic hasn’t yet decided what the chip will be used for, how it will fit into the server, or how powerful it will be, according to the report.

When reached for comment, Anthropic told TechCrunch that a diversified hardware stack that includes chips from Google, Amazon, and Nvidia will continue to be pivotal to its compute strategy. On the topic of a potential Samsung partnership, the company said it had nothing further to add.

A number of AI companies have sought to develop custom chips — both as a way to create unique hardware for specific compute tasks and to gain a certain amount of independence from Nvidia, which continues to be the undisputed leader of the chip industry.

Anthropic’s announcement may also be a response to one made last week by its key competitor, OpenAI, which has teamed up with Broadcom to announce its own custom-built inference processor, dubbed “Jalapeño.” OpenAI says that the chip is more efficient, demonstrating better performance-per-watt, than other competitor chips. Amazon and Google both offer custom-built TPUs as part of their cloud offering.

Samsung is already embedded in the AI industry, and acts as a major partner of Nvidia, producing chips that the company needs to train or run its AI models. In turn, Samsung uses Nvidia’s software to manufacture its chips. The duo are working on an AI chip factory in South Korea. Samsung has also discussed partnering with Google on its chip-making efforts.

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