Meta in Talks for $10B AI Compute Deal With Anthropic, Stock Slides 5% After Hours

As of 5:30 PM ET on July 3, Meta Platforms (META) was trading at $582.90 in after-hours, down 4.90% (-$30.01) from its close of $612.91. During the regular session, shares ranged between $580.42 and $610, opening at $607.895. The catalyst: a SemiAnalysis exclusive that Meta is finalizing a potentially $10 billion AI compute deal with Anthropic, alongside news of Anthropic's custom chip talks with Samsung, which has sparked broad debate about shifts in the AI chip supply chain.

Samsung and Anthropic: The Custom Chip Talks

According to a July 2 report from The Information, AI startup Anthropic is in early discussions with South Korean tech giant Samsung Electronics about co-developing a custom AI accelerator.^[TechCrunch] The report notes that no final decisions have been made on key details like target workloads or performance specs. Anthropic told TechCrunch that a diversified hardware stack — including chips from Google, Amazon, and Nvidia — "remains key to its compute strategy" and had "nothing further to add" on the Samsung talks.^[TechCrunch]

Multiple outlets have highlighted Samsung's unique advantages in AI chip manufacturing. Reports from SiliconANGLE and Yahoo/Investing note that Samsung's capabilities include a 2nm process node, advanced packaging, and in-house production of high-bandwidth memory (HBM) — all seen as key technical foundations for a potential Anthropic partnership.^{[Let's Data Science]} Coverage from The Next Web and Yahoo also notes that Anthropic recently hired Clive Chan, an engineer who worked on custom chip projects at OpenAI, a move widely interpreted as a signal the chip project has moved beyond the exploratory phase.^{[Let's Data Science]}

Samsung's AI Chip Manufacturing Landscape

At the Samsung Foundry SAFE Forum 2026 held July 1 in Seoul's Seocho district, the company's foundry division disclosed progress on several customer projects. Park Sang-hoon, head of the customer design support team at Samsung Foundry, said the company is working with "well-known companies that everyone can recognize" on 2nm process technology, and revealed that "development was completed in just eight months with a company focused on automotive and physical AI."^[thelec.net] Industry observers widely believe this refers to Tesla's 2nm chip project.

Park also mentioned that a 4nm customer — "Korea's largest AI company" — is about to begin mass production of a chip integrating 12 dies, small decoupling capacitors, HBM, and a UCIe interface. Additionally, a language processing unit (LPU) already in mass production was described as "made for a GPU company," containing over 4 gigabits of SRAM and measuring 723 square millimeters; industry watchers believe the client is likely Nvidia's Groq.^[thelec.net]

Samsung reaffirmed its process roadmap at the forum: mass production of a 1.4nm process is planned for 2029, followed by an enhanced 1.4+ process. These technology reserves provide a potential manufacturing base for custom chip demand from AI companies like Anthropic.

Meta and Anthropic's $10 Billion Compute Deal

SemiAnalysis exclusively disclosed in a July 2 paywalled report that Meta is in final negotiations with Anthropic for a private instance of Claude.^{[SemiAnalysis]} The report likens the potential deal to model access patterns offered by hyperscalers like Amazon Bedrock, Microsoft Foundry, or Google Vertex AI, and estimates its value could reach the tens of billions. The report says Meta's demand for Anthropic's models covers both internal use and building sales and marketing SaaS products powered by frontier AI agents, and expects Meta to launch "token-as-a-service" endpoints, moving progressively up the stack.

SemiAnalysis also reveals that Meta has already signed up over 5GW of cloud and colocation capacity in the first half of this year, with its own buildout accelerating. The report says Meta's 2027 capex will be "staggeringly high" and lists four high-value use cases: frontier AI model training, recommendation system (RecSys) scaling, Anthropic model access, and on-demand compute deals similar to SpaceX's.^{[SemiAnalysis]} The report's authors argue that market fears of Meta becoming a "Neocloud" and creating compute overcapacity are misplaced, and that Meta's compute procurement will "accelerate, not slow down."

Competitive Landscape and Market Reaction

Anthropic's custom chip plans are widely seen as a direct response to rival OpenAI. Last week, OpenAI unveiled its own inference processor, "Jalapeño," built with Broadcom, claiming superior energy efficiency.^[TechCrunch] Google and Amazon already offer custom TPUs as part of their cloud services, Apple has integrated a Neural Engine into its M-series chips, and Microsoft is developing its Maia chip. Anthropic, the last major frontier AI lab without a clear chip strategy, is now joining the fray.

Analysis from FourWeekMBA argues that custom chips are not a cost-cutting measure but a "capability control" strategy — labs that control their own inference hardware can manage latency, throughput ceilings, and the margin structure of every product built on top.^{[FourWeekMBA]} According to Grand View Research, the global AI chip market was worth $61.6 billion in 2024, while Nvidia's estimated share of the AI training GPU market in 2025 exceeds 90%.^{[FourWeekMBA]}

As of press time, Meta's after-hours stock was down nearly 5%, reflecting market concerns about the potential capital expenditure pressure from this massive deal and the shifting competitive landscape. Both the Anthropic-Samsung talks and Meta's compute procurement plans are in early or negotiation stages, with final outcomes still pending.

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