Add Anthropic to the list of AI labs that would very much like to stop paying the Nvidia tax. The Information reported on July 2 that Anthropic has entered early talks with Samsung Electronics to manufacture a custom AI accelerator, potentially on Samsung’s 2nm process with advanced packaging.
Still early, but telling
The talks are preliminary — Anthropic has hired specialized silicon engineers and is still defining specs, power requirements, and how a custom chip would slot into its server clusters. Nothing’s built. But the direction is unmistakable: another frontier lab pursuing vertical integration to reduce its dependence on Nvidia, whose GPUs have been both the enabler and the single biggest line item of the entire AI boom.
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Why everyone’s suddenly a chip company
The logic is brutal and simple. If you’re spending billions a year renting or buying Nvidia silicon, even a partial move to your own custom accelerator — tuned to exactly your workloads — can reshape your cost structure and your supply security. Google has TPUs. Amazon has Trainium. OpenAI has been down this road. Now Anthropic. The “just buy Nvidia” era is quietly giving way to a “design around Nvidia” era, at least for the handful of players with the scale to justify it.
The catch
Designing a competitive AI chip is monstrously hard and expensive, and Nvidia’s real moat isn’t just the silicon — it’s the CUDA software ecosystem everything is built on. Most custom-chip efforts end up as a complement to Nvidia, not a replacement, handling specific inference workloads while the hard training stays on GPUs. For Samsung, though, landing a marquee AI-lab foundry customer alongside the likes of Tesla is a genuine win in its fight with TSMC. Whether Anthropic’s chip ever ships is an open question. That it’s trying at all tells you how badly the whole industry wants off the leash.