In April, Reuters reported that Anthropic was toying with the idea of ​​producing its own AI chips as a way to respond to the chip shortage. Now it seems that the company is taking this idea seriously.

On Thursday, The Information reported that Anthropic was in contact with Samsung to explore a collaboration around the pending chip. However, Anthropic has not yet decided what the chip will be used for, how it will fit into the server or how powerful it will be, according to the report.

When reached for comment, Anthropic told TechCrunch that a diversified hardware stack that includes chips from Google, Amazon and Nvidia will remain central to its computing strategy. On the topic of a possible partnership with Samsung, the company said it had nothing more to add.

Several artificial intelligence companies have sought to develop custom chips, both as a way to create unique hardware for specific computing tasks and to gain some independence from Nvidia, which remains the undisputed leader of the chip industry.

Anthropic’s announcement may also be a response to one made last week by its key competitor, OpenAI, which has partnered with Broadcom to announce its own custom inference processor, dubbed “Jalapeno.” OpenAI says the chip is more efficient and demonstrates better performance per watt than other competing chips. Amazon and Google offer custom TPUs as part of their cloud offering.

Samsung is already embedded in the AI ​​industry and acts as an important partner to Nvidia, producing the chips the company needs to train or run its AI models. In turn, Samsung uses Nvidia software to manufacture its chips. The duo is working at an AI chip factory in South Korea. Samsung has also discussed the possibility of partnering with Google in its chip manufacturing efforts.