Top chip manufacturer TSMC is ready to invest $1 billion in Anthropic and OpenAI. That would give the Taiwanese chipmaker direct stakes in leading AI developers, even as its own contract chipmaking business has profited enormously from the AI data center buildout.
The chipmaker’s board approved plans to invest up to $500 million in OpenAI preferred stock reserved for large investors and another $500 million to purchase Anthropic common shares at the latter’s expected IPO price, according to Reuters. Such an investment may give markets “a shot of confidence as the artificial-intelligence trade shows signs of strain,” The Wall Street Journal reported.
But analysts also warned that such circular financing among investors, suppliers, and customers has made it difficult to evaluate real market demand for AI-related hardware and services, according to the Journal.
TSMC’s chip fabrication plants physically produce the vast majority of Nvidia’s chips designed for AI data center workloads and make most of Apple’s custom chips used in iPhones, Mac laptops and desktops, plus Apple’s planned AI computing server. Most of these fabs are located in Taiwan, but TSMC also operates fabs in Japan and China, and it has an expanding US manufacturing cluster in Arizona. It is also building a new fab in Germany.
