Anthropic said on Thursday in the United States that it had raised $65 billion in a Series H funding round that valued the company at $965 billion, or about 1,440 trillion won — figures that rank among the largest private fundraisings and highest private valuations on record. The world's three memory-chip makers — Samsung Electronics, SK hynix and Micron Technology — joined the round as "strategic infrastructure partners." Anthropic said the trio's technology plays a core role in the global supply of memory, storage and logic chips, and that the partnerships would help it expand its computing capacity to meet customer demand. Neither Anthropic nor Samsung has confirmed a specific foundry order.
The reference to logic chips is the basis for the foundry speculation. Logic chips are produced through foundry processes, and of the three memory companies in the round, only Samsung Electronics operates a foundry — neither SK hynix nor Micron has a foundry division. The industry has therefore read Anthropic's statement as a signal that the partnership extends beyond memory into contract manufacturing, with Samsung positioned to produce the AI chips that power Claude.
Anthropic, regarded alongside OpenAI as one of the world's leading AI-model developers, would become a major addition to a Samsung foundry customer list that has been rebuilding in recent months. Samsung has already secured orders for Tesla's next-generation AI5 and AI6 chips, and produces the upgraded version of the AI4. It manufactures the Groq 3 Language Processing Unit, an inference chip originally designed by Groq and now produced for Nvidia following Nvidia's $20 billion licensing acquisition of Groq's core technology in late 2025. Samsung is also set to supply image sensors for Apple's new iPhone next year.
That matters because the foundry has been a drag on Samsung's earnings for several years. As of 2025, the company held second place in the global foundry market with a 7.2 percent share, but TSMC of Taiwan led at 69.9 percent — a gap of 62.7 percentage points. The recent run of customer wins is not expected to close that share gap meaningfully in the near term, but it has revived hopes the foundry unit itself could return to profit next year, an aim more modest than catching the market leader.
The Anthropic investment is being read in the industry as a step beyond a financial stake. Samsung has positioned itself as a "one-stop solution" provider combining high-bandwidth memory, advanced foundry processes and advanced packaging, an offering it is now extending into AI-infrastructure partnerships. As the AI market evolves from a memory-supply contest into a broader ecosystem spanning chip design, production, packaging and system optimization, the company appears to be using its full semiconductor portfolio to deepen relationships with the AI sector's most important players.
"Samsung's investment is not a simple equity stake in an AI company but a signal that Samsung is broadening strategic relationships with the core players of the AI era," a person in the semiconductor industry said. "Expectations are growing that Samsung's foundry business may seize another opportunity as the AI market expands."
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