Samsung Electronics and SK hynix are said to have executed investments in the billions of dollars in the U.S. artificial intelligence (AI) corporations Anthropic. Anthropic previously shared the results of the funding round and introduced Samsung Electronics, SK hynix, and Micron as strategic infrastructure partners.
According to the industry on the 31st, the amounts that Samsung Electronics and SK hynix recently invested in Anthropic are each in the trillions of won. Samsung Electronics' standalone investment is in the multi-trillion-won range, and among the three memory companies including Micron, Samsung Electronics is said to have invested the most. Anthropic did not disclose individual investment amounts.
Anthropic said on the 28th (local time) that it raised $65 billion (about 98 trillion won) in its Series H funding round. The post-investment corporate value was assessed at $965 billion (about 1,440 trillion won). The round was led by Altimeter Capital, Dragoneer, Gleanox, and Sequoia Capital.
Samsung Electronics, SK hynix, and Micron participated in the round as strategic infrastructure partners. Anthropic said the technology of these corporations plays a key role in global supplies of memory, storage, and logic chips. As demand for Claude increases, cooperation with them helps expand computing capacity reliably.
Anthropic signed a contract with Amazon to secure up to 5 GW (gigawatts) of new computing capacity, and reached an agreement with Google and Broadcom to build 5 GW of computing infrastructure based on next-generation tensor processing units (TPUs). TPUs are semiconductors that Google developed for AI computation.
Anthropic said this funding round included $15 billion (about 22.605 trillion won) in pre-committed investments from existing hyperscalers, including Amazon. Hyperscalers are corporations that operate large-scale cloud and data center infrastructure. Reuters reported that this included Amazon's $5 billion (about 7.535 trillion won) investment. With the latest investments by Samsung Electronics and SK hynix, high-bandwidth memory (HBM) is expected to be installed in the data center infrastructure that Anthropic is building to operate major AI agents.
For Samsung Electronics, the possibility of cooperation beyond memory is also being discussed. In describing the technologies of the corporations participating in the investment, Anthropic mentioned logic chips. Since Samsung Electronics operates both memory and foundry (contract chip manufacturing), analysts say the potential for collaboration is high. Reuters said expectations for opportunities in Samsung Electronics' foundry business have grown since Anthropic referred to Samsung Electronics as a strategic infrastructure partner.
Anthropic is the corporations that developed the Generative AI service "Claude." The funds will be used to strengthen research on AI safety and interpretability and to expand computing infrastructure to meet rising demand for Claude.