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Samsung, SK hynix back Anthropic in $65B round, paving way for chip deal

Published: 29 May. 2026, 15:12

LEE JAE-LIM
[email protected]

Anthropic logo is seen in this illustration taken March 1 [REUTERS/YONHAP]

Samsung Electronics and SK hynix both participated in Anthropic's latest Series H funding round, which valued the U.S. AI company at $965 billion. Samsung's involvement is expected to lay the groundwork for a chip design or manufacturing deal to produce Anthropic's AI chips.

Anthropic announced Thursday that it has formed partnerships with the world's three largest memory suppliers — Samsung Electronics, SK hynix and Micron — as the company's computing and memory demands continue to grow. The round raised $65 billion in total, with $15 billion coming from cloud giants and hyperscalers, including Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google and Broadcom.

"[Their] technologies play a critical role in the world's supply of memory, storage and logic chips," Anthropic said in a statement. "As demand for Claude continues to grow, these relationships will help us scale our compute reliably at the pace our customers need."

Of the three memory suppliers, Samsung is the only one that also designs and manufactures logic chips — processors such as CPUs and GPUs. The company has already secured Tesla and Nvidia as foundry clients, and is expected to begin producing Tesla's AI5 and AI6 chips at its Taylor, Texas, plant beginning next year, following a $16.5 billion deal signed in July 2025. Samsung is also manufacturing Groq's latest inference chip, the Nvidia Groq 3 LPU, which is expected to begin shipping in the second half of this year.

With the latest round, Anthropic is now the most valuable private AI company, surpassing rival OpenAI, whose most recent pre-money valuation stood at $730 billion. The round was co-led by Capital Group, Coatue, D1 Capital Partners, GIC, Iconiq and XN, with significant participation from AMP PBC, Baillie Gifford, Blackstone, Brookfield, and others.

To feed its rapidly growing compute needs, Anthropic has locked in 5 gigawatts of capacity from AWS, an additional 5 gigawatts of next-generation TPU capacity from Google and Broadcom, and is also renting GPU capacity from SpaceX's Colossus 1 and Colossus 2 — xAI's GPU supercluster.

BY LEE JAE-LIM [[email protected]]