Samsung Electronics and SK hynix took strategic equity stakes in Anthropic, the San Francisco-based developer of the Claude AI model, as part of a $65 billion Series H funding round announced Thursday that pushed the startup's valuation to $965 billion — making it the world's most valuable private AI company and overtaking OpenAI's $852 billion price tag from late March.
The three memory chipmakers — Samsung, SK hynix, and Micron — joined as "strategic infrastructure partners," a designation that goes beyond passive equity, signaling Anthropic's intent to deepen ties with the hardware layer underpinning its models. Capital Group and Coatue co-led the round, with Singapore's GIC, Blackstone, Fidelity, Baillie Gifford, and Temasek also participating.
The $965 billion valuation marks a 154 percent surge from Anthropic's $380 billion figure in February, compressed into roughly three months. Anthropic posted annualized revenue above $47 billion and expects its first operating profit as early as Q2 2026.
Samsung's Foundry Angle
Of the three memory partners, Samsung is the only one that also operates a chip foundry, and the phrase "logic chips" in Anthropic's announcement has fuelled speculation that Samsung Foundry — currently holding 7.2 percent of the contract-chip market — could win custom AI accelerator orders to power Claude. Samsung already fabricates Tesla's AI5 and AI6 processors and Nvidia's Grok3 chip, giving it credibility in high-profile AI compute production.
"This investment is not a simple equity stake in an AI company," one industry analyst told Korea Herald. "It signals that Samsung is broadening strategic ties with the key players of the AI era, and there is growing hope that its foundry business can seize a fresh opportunity."
SK Hynix's HBM Position
SK hynix's interest is more direct: the company is the dominant global supplier of HBM (high-bandwidth memory), the stacked chip architecture that powers Nvidia's AI accelerators. Locking in a strategic partnership with Anthropic reinforces SK hynix's position at the top of the memory supply chain as demand for HBM scales with AI inference workloads. SK hynix recently delivered HBM4 samples to Nvidia and struck an HBM4 supply agreement with AMD, building a portfolio of AI-infrastructure relationships that the Anthropic stake extends.
What It Means for Korea's Chip Stocks
The investment coincides with a sharp re-rating of Korean chipmakers' forward multiples. Samsung and SK hynix shares have outpaced the broader KOSPI this month as investors price in not just a cyclical memory upcycle but a structural realignment toward AI-infrastructure roles. Yet execution risk remains: Samsung Foundry has lagged TSMC on advanced-node yields, and a meaningful custom-chip contract would require sustained progress on its 2-nm process. SK hynix must simultaneously serve Nvidia, AMD, Google, and now Anthropic — a supply-chain juggling act that gets harder as HBM demand accelerates.
Still, the symbolic weight of the deal is hard to dismiss. Korean chip capital is now at the table alongside GIC, Blackstone, and Fidelity — institutional endorsement that signals Seoul's chipmakers view AI infrastructure not as a customer relationship but as a structural ownership stake in the next computing paradigm.
Sources: Korea Herald · KED Global
