Samsung Electronics Eyed for Anthropic Chip Order… Foundry Revival Begins

Samsung Electronics has made an investment in Anthropic, the U.S. AI company behind the AI model "Claude," raising the possibility of a foundry partnership in which Samsung would manufacture Anthropic's chips on a contract basis.

Samsung's foundry business, which has run at a loss for several years, has recently landed a string of major global customers, fueling growing expectations for a return to profitability next year.

On the 28th (local time), Anthropic announced that it had raised $65 billion in its recent Series H funding round, with its post-money valuation assessed at $965 billion (about 1,440 trillion won).

The three major memory semiconductor manufacturers—Samsung Electronics, SK Hynix, and Micron—participated in this funding round as "strategic infrastructure partners."

Anthropic emphasized that "the technologies of these companies play a critical role in the global supply of memory, storage, and logic chips," adding that "partnerships with them will be a great help in reliably scaling computing capacity to meet customer needs."

Anthropic's mention of "logic chips" in its announcement has prompted speculation about a foundry partnership with Samsung Electronics. The process of manufacturing logic chips is foundry work, and aside from Samsung Electronics, neither Micron nor SK Hynix has a foundry division. For this reason, the industry analyzes that Samsung Electronics and Anthropic will newly collaborate not just at the memory level but also in foundry.

This implies a high likelihood that Samsung Electronics will produce the AI chips used in Anthropic's flagship model "Claude." Anthropic, alongside OpenAI, is regarded as one of the world's leading AI model companies and a core AI player. The prevailing view is that Samsung's foundry has secured yet another major customer, following Tesla, NVIDIA, and others.

Earlier, Samsung Electronics won orders for Tesla's next-generation AI chips, "AI5" and "AI6." Samsung's foundry is also handling production of an upgraded version of "AI4." NVIDIA's inference-dedicated language processing unit (LPU) chip "Grok3" is likewise being produced through Samsung's foundry. Samsung Electronics also plans to supply the image sensor to be mounted in Apple's new iPhone next year.

Accordingly, attention is focused on whether Samsung Electronics' foundry business—which has run at a loss in recent years—can regain its vitality. As of last year, Samsung Electronics held second place (7.2%) in the global foundry market, but the gap with first-place TSMC (69.9%) reaches 62.7 percentage points.

Regarding Samsung's investment in Anthropic, the industry views it as strategic cooperation spanning "AI semiconductors, memory, foundry, and AI infrastructure." Samsung Electronics is positioning a "one-stop solution"—encompassing high-bandwidth memory (HBM), advanced foundry processes, and advanced packaging—as its differentiation point. As the AI market evolves into an ecosystem centered not only on HBM supply but also AI chip design, production, packaging, and system optimization, the move is interpreted as Samsung strengthening partnerships by leveraging its competitiveness across the semiconductor spectrum.

A semiconductor industry official said, "Samsung's investment is not a simple equity stake in an AI company, but is interpreted as a signal that Samsung is earnestly expanding strategic relationships with the key players of the AI era," adding, "Expectations are growing as to whether Samsung's foundry business can seize another opportunity amid the expansion of the AI market."

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