Anthropic is reportedly in early talks with Samsung about manufacturing a custom AI chip, and separately, the company is moving ahead with plans to go public as soon as October — two storylines that have been developing quietly for weeks and are now converging into one clearer picture of where Anthropic is headed next.
What’s Confirmed
According to The Information, which first reported the chip talks around July 2-4, Anthropic is in early-stage discussions with Samsung about producing a custom AI accelerator, reportedly eyeing Samsung’s 2nm manufacturing process. The reporting is explicit that this is early: no chip has been designed, no testing has begun, and Anthropic hasn’t settled on the chip’s exact use case or how it would integrate into its server infrastructure. Sources close to the talks told The Information a final agreement “may not be reached” — this is a real conversation, not a signed deal. Both Anthropic and Samsung declined to comment when approached.
One concrete signal the talks are serious: Anthropic hired Clive Chan in June, the second hardware engineer to leave OpenAI’s own custom-chip program for Anthropic in recent months, following an earlier departure announced June 7.
On the IPO side, the timeline is further along and better documented. Anthropic filed a confidential S-1 with the SEC on June 1, opening the regulatory review window toward a possible October 2026 Nasdaq listing. Bloomberg reported mid-July that investment bankers have already begun investor roadshow meetings, with updates on the process continuing through July 21. The company closed a $65 billion Series H round in May at a $965 billion post-money valuation — and bankers are now reportedly treating a public debut valuation north of $1 trillion as the base case, not a stretch scenario.
Why This Matters
Custom silicon has become the tell for which AI labs think they’re going to be around long enough to need it. OpenAI has its own chip program with Broadcom, reportedly codenamed “Jalapeño.” Google has TPUs, Amazon has Trainium, Microsoft has Maia — all four are hedging against total dependence on Nvidia, whose GPUs remain the default but come with cost and supply-chain exposure that scales badly at frontier-lab volume. Anthropic exploring the same path with Samsung specifically would also hand Samsung’s foundry business a marquee customer to compete with TSMC’s dominance in advanced-node manufacturing, which is presumably part of why Samsung is willing to have the conversation at all.
The IPO timeline matters for a more direct reason: if Anthropic files in October, it would likely beat OpenAI to a public listing — Bloomberg’s reporting suggests OpenAI’s own IPO is seen internally as more probable in 2027 than 2026. Being first to Wall Street among the two biggest frontier labs is not a small distinction for investor attention or valuation comparisons that will follow both companies for years.
What’s Still Unconfirmed
Two things worth treating skeptically until there’s harder confirmation. First, the Samsung chip deal itself — “early talks” that “may not be reached” is meaningfully different from a signed manufacturing agreement, and it’s worth waiting for a follow-up report before assuming this chip actually gets built. Second, a widely circulated figure claiming a “76.5% probability” of the IPO completing by the end of 2026 traces back to a prediction-market-style aggregator, not a statement from Anthropic or its bankers — treat it as market sentiment, not a confirmed timeline.
What’s Next
Watch for two separate signals in the coming weeks: any confirmation or denial from Samsung on the chip talks, and further roadshow reporting that would firm up whether October remains the real target for the S-1 to go effective. Neither storyline is resolved yet, but both point in the same direction — Anthropic positioning itself as a company built for scale that intends to control more of its own stack, from silicon to the public markets, on a faster timeline than its biggest rival.
Anthropic isn’t the only AI lab navigating government scrutiny while it scales — OpenAI’s own government-oversight headache with GPT-5.6 is playing out on a similar clock. And the compute side of this story connects directly to the AI compute deals reshaping Big Tech’s balance sheets, which is the same underlying scramble for chip capacity driving Anthropic toward Samsung in the first place.
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