Tesla, Meta, and Anthropic: Samsung chip order 50 trillion Korean won

Author: Bao Yilong; Source: Wall Street Insights

Samsung Electronics is rapidly establishing its core position in the AI semiconductor market through its foundry business.

On July 3, according to South Korean media reports, the backlog of mid- to long-term orders in Samsung’s foundry division has nearly reached 500 trillion won. After signing Tesla’s AI chip orders last year, two global technology giants, Meta and Anthropic, have also shifted their ASIC production demand to Samsung.

An industry insider said:

Since Samsung’s foundry secured Tesla’s AI chip orders last year, foundry orders for semiconductors for AI servers have entered a phase of full acceleration.

Fueled by this, the market expects Samsung’s foundry business to return to profitability as early as the fourth quarter of this year. A key driver behind this round of order expansion is Samsung’s most advanced 2-nanometer process technology.

Meta’s third-generation AI accelerator chip MTIA 3 and Anthropic’s custom ASIC are both planned to be produced using this process. External inquiries about Samsung’s 2-nanometer process have surged sharply, further strengthening its competitive position in the advanced-process foundry market.

Meta switches its orders to Samsung, betting on 2-nanometer mass production

According to reports citing industry sources, Meta is in talks with Samsung’s foundry division regarding next-generation ASIC design and production cooperation worth more than 100 trillion won.

Meta’s first two generations of its self-developed AI accelerator MTIA were manufactured by TSMC, but starting with the third generation released this year, Meta has locked Samsung as its core manufacturing partner.

According to reports, the MTIA 3 generation will use Samsung’s most advanced 2-nanometer process at a production scale on the order of hundreds of thousands of wafers. Samsung Electronics said, “No final decision has been made yet.”

Behind Meta’s shift to Samsung is its strategic need for large-scale self-built AI infrastructure.

Meta is exploring a cloud services business that rents AI computing power to external enterprises, and MTIA will serve as the core chip to support the rollout of this business.

At the same time, Meta has set a goal to build data centers with a total capacity of 5 gigawatts before 2030, which means that relying purely on external chip supply is not sustainable.

To this end, Meta has kicked off a high-speed development schedule of iterating a new chip every six months, planning to complete continuous launches from the third to the fifth generation next year.

To support the above ultra-fast development cycle, Meta has also established a joint design mechanism with Samsung’s System LSI business unit. Reports say that both sides’ collaboration has already begun from the early stage of chip architecture design, in order to make up for the capacity gap of Meta’s own engineering team under such a compressed timeline.

Anthropic internalizes AI infrastructure—Samsung could be the biggest beneficiary

U.S. AI company Anthropic is also reportedly evaluating the use of Samsung’s 2-nanometer process to develop custom ASICs. This move is seen as part of its strategy to cut reliance on Nvidia GPUs and Google TPUs and to advance its “AI infrastructure autonomy” strategy.

In terms of investment scale, Anthropic’s long-term plan is to build AI data centers with a total capacity of about 1 gigawatt, and its total related investment is estimated at about 50 billion dollars (about 77 trillion won).

Industry analysis holds that about half of the funds will go toward AI semiconductor procurement, and the semiconductor investment amount covering ASIC, DRAM, and NAND flash is expected to be about 25 billion dollars (about 39 trillion won).

Samsung Electronics, which has integrated semiconductor capabilities spanning memory, foundry, and advanced packaging, is widely viewed as the biggest potential beneficiary of Anthropic’s AI chip purchases.

In May this year, Samsung participated in Anthropic’s Series H financing of 65 billion dollars (about 100 trillion won), thereby establishing the two sides’ strategic partnership.