Anthropic steals OpenAI chip guru to build its own silicon with Samsung
Because having a state-of-the-art AI model isn't cool anymore. Now, every tech bro company needs its own bespoke, organic, artisanal silicon to feel validated. Anthropic is officially joining the 'we also make chips' club, and they are bringing some stolen talent.
The startup behind Claude has quietly started building its own engineering team to design custom AI chips, initiating early-stage talks with the Korean giant Samsung. They are eyeing a fancy 2-nanometer manufacturing process and advanced packaging technologies to turn their hardware dreams into reality.
To make this more than just a PowerPoint slide, Anthropic snatched Clive Chan, a heavyweight chip designer who spent two and a half years as the second hire for OpenAI's custom silicon project, right after a stint working on the Dojo supercomputer at Tesla. Poaching your rival's key brains is, of course, the ultimate form of flattery in the valley.
Despite the high-profile hire, the project is so raw that the actual chip design doesn't even exist yet. Anthropic was quick to assure everyone that their best friends are still Amazon Web Services with their Trainium chips, Google's TPUs, and Nvidia's gold-standard GPUs.
This move closely mirrors OpenAI, which partnered with Broadcom to design its own silicon and recently showed off its Jalapeño chip. Meanwhile, Nvidia continues to laugh all the way to the bank, holding a massive 74% share of the AI chip market.
In the end, this silicon craze looks less like a strategic revolution and more like a high-society panic where every AI firm spends billions trying to escape Jensen Huang's leather-jacket-clad monopoly. Designing chips is a brutal game of capital, and history shows that wanting your own silicon is much easier than actually making it work at scale.
Source: The Information
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