Anthropic has asked SK hynix to supply components for semiconductors it intends to build itself, SK Group chairman Chey Tae-won said on stage alongside Anthropic chief executive Dario Amodei at Friday's technology summit in San Francisco.
What was actually said
Chey framed the request as significant in itself: for an AI company to aspire to develop chips independently, he said, carries extraordinary significance. The effort spans both ASICs and GPUs. What exists today is a supply request — not a signed agreement, and not a taped-out chip.
The memory deals are separate
Amodei confirmed at the same event that Anthropic has struck memory supply deals with both Samsung Electronics and SK hynix, but disclosed no value, no volume and no term. He described South Korea as the best place at present to build an AI data center quickly. The Korean presidential briefing attributed about 1 gigawatt of the summit's roughly 5-gigawatt total to Anthropic — a government figure, not a company one.
Why SK is already inside
SK hynix participated in Anthropic's May 2026 Series H, and completed a Nasdaq listing in July 2026 at a $26.5 billion valuation. Anthropic's $50 billion data center program with Fluidstack, announced in November 2025, covers sites in Texas and New York.
The path others took
Google has shipped TPUs for a decade, Amazon has Trainium and Inferentia, Meta has MTIA. Each built silicon to stop paying Nvidia's margin at scale. Anthropic reaching the same conclusion — while separately committing to 2 gigawatts of AMD MI450 capacity — suggests its compute bill has crossed the point where designing chips beats buying them.
What Amodei did not say
Reuters noted that Amodei declined to comment on a separately reported chip-design plan. Coverage presenting Anthropic as having announced a custom chip program in Korea is reading past the record.