Samsung, SK hynix invest in Anthropic as AI chip demand surges

New tie-up fuels hopes for Samsung's foundry orders

(AP-Yonhap)

Samsung Electronics and SK hynix have taken strategic stakes in Anthropic, the developer of the Claude artificial intelligence models, joining a funding round that valued the US startup at $965 billion, making it the world's most valuable AI company ahead of OpenAI.

The deal is also fueling expectations that Samsung could win future AI chip manufacturing orders from Anthropic, boosting its foundry business.

The two Korean chipmakers signed on as strategic infrastructure partners alongside US memory maker Micron, Anthropic announced Thursday in the US. The investment came as Anthropic closed a $65 billion Series H round valuing the company at $965 billion, more than double the $380 billion it carried in February.

The figure pushes Anthropic ahead of OpenAI, which reached a valuation of $852 billion in late March, as both firms move toward expected public listings this year.

For the Korean firms, the interest lies in what the partnership could mean for hardware demand. In its press release, Anthropic said the technologies of its memory partners "play a critical role in the world's supply of memory, storage and logic chips," adding that the relationships would help it "scale our compute reliably at the pace our customers need."

The mention of logic chips has drawn particular attention in Korea. Logic chips are made through foundry or contract manufacturing. Among the three memory partners, only Samsung runs a foundry business. The wording has fueled speculation that Samsung's role could extend beyond supplying memory to fabricating the custom AI chips that power Claude.

Such a deal would hand a new marquee client to a foundry operation that has run at a loss for several years but is now drawing expectations of a return to profit next year. The unit has recently won orders, including Tesla's next-generation AI5 and AI6 chips, and is producing Nvidia's Grok3 inference processor. Samsung ranked second in the global foundry market last year with a 7.2 percent share, though it trails leader TSMC by 62.7 percentage points.

"This investment is not a simple equity stake in an AI company," a semiconductor industry official told Yonhap News on Friday. "It signals that Samsung is broadening strategic ties with the key players of the AI era, and there is growing hope that its foundry business can seize a fresh opportunity as the AI market expands."

The round drew a roster of global backers, co-led by Capital Group, Coatue and Singapore's GIC, with participation from Blackstone, Fidelity, Baillie Gifford and the sovereign wealth fund Temasek.

Anthropic, founded in 2021 by former OpenAI staff, said its annualized revenue surpassed $47 billion earlier this month and is expected to post its first operating profit in the second quarter. Its valuation has climbed faster than that of any company in venture-capital history, according to PitchBook data cited by The Wall Street Journal, reaching the latest mark roughly three years and two months after the first Claude product launched.