Meta’s reported Samsung AI chip deal hits a wall as Anthropic steps into the conversation
The 10 trillion won custom chip partnership appears to have stalled, while a different AI heavyweight quietly explores Samsung's foundry services
The story of Meta teaming up with Samsung to produce a massive custom AI chip sounded like a blockbuster deal. A project reportedly valued at around 10 trillion won, roughly $7.3 billion, would have represented one of the largest custom silicon partnerships in the AI era. There’s just one problem: Meta apparently asked Samsung to halt development.
As of early June 2026, reports indicate that Meta requested Samsung to pause or halt development work on the custom chip project. No verified agreement between the two companies has been confirmed, and what initially looked like a landmark semiconductor deal now looks more like a partnership that never quite got off the ground.
What actually happened
Samsung, for its part, hasn’t been left standing at the altar. The South Korean giant secured a $16.5 billion deal with Tesla for AI chip production, announced in 2025, proving it can attract major clients in the custom silicon space.
Anthropic, the AI company behind Claude, is currently in preliminary discussions with Samsung to manufacture a custom AI chip. Those talks are still early-stage as of July 2, 2026, with specifications and server integration details yet to be finalized.
The capacity crunch driving these deals
TSMC, the world’s dominant chipmaker, is essentially booked solid. That’s pushing AI companies to explore alternatives, and Samsung is the most obvious Plan B.
Samsung has committed to semiconductor and AI investments totaling approximately 1,000 trillion won, about $648 billion, over the next decade. These investments are focused on bolstering Samsung’s foundry capabilities in South Korea, and they are separate from any individual client deal.
Why Meta’s pause matters for the AI chip landscape
For Anthropic, the calculus may be different. As a younger company still scaling its infrastructure, Anthropic might be more willing to work through the growing pains of a Samsung partnership in exchange for securing capacity that competitors can’t access at TSMC.
Meta, meanwhile, has been focusing on its own MTIA inference chips primarily in collaboration with TSMC, which indicates that any discussions with Samsung were exploratory rather than substantive.