Tag: Samsung

  • TSMC, Samsung Back ASML’s Next-Gen EUV Machines

    TSMC, Samsung Back ASML’s Next-Gen EUV Machines

    TL;DR · 30-second read

    The Short Version

    The world’s two largest advanced chip factories, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company and Samsung, have agreed to buy the newest chip-printing machines from the Dutch equipment maker ASML. These machines use light to print circuit patterns onto silicon wafers, a bit like a photographic enlarger working at a scale smaller than a virus.

    ASML and the Taiwanese chipmaker also plan to switch to glass stencils twice as wide as today’s. Wider stencils mean bigger chips can be printed in one shot, and bigger chips printed in one shot are cheaper chips. Those are the chips that run artificial intelligence.

    ASML has secured commitments from Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) and Samsung Electronics for its newest generation of extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography systems, according to Bloomberg, with CNBC and Seeking Alpha reporting the same commitments and tying the demand to the artificial-intelligence buildout. Separately, Focus Taiwan and EU Today reported that TSMC and ASML are working together on 12-inch EUV photomasks, a step up from the 6-inch masks that have been the industry standard for decades, intended to widen what High-NA machines can print.

    Neither the tool commitments nor the photomask programme came with disclosed unit volumes, pricing, delivery dates or the process nodes involved. What is established is the direction: the two largest advanced-logic manufacturers on the planet have now publicly aligned themselves with ASML’s next lithography platform, and one of them is prepared to change the format of the mask itself to get more out of it.

    Executive Summary

    Lithography is the step in chipmaking where a circuit pattern is projected onto a silicon wafer. ASML is the only company in the world that builds EUV lithography systems, and its High-NA generation — ‘NA’ meaning numerical aperture, a measure of how much light the lens can collect and therefore how fine a pattern it can resolve — is the successor platform that the entire logic roadmap eventually has to migrate to. TSMC and Samsung committing to those tools removes the largest open question about High-NA: whether the volume foundries would adopt it, or ride existing EUV with multiple patterning for another generation.

    The photomask news is the more technically interesting half. A photomask is the stencil carrying the circuit pattern; today it is a 6-inch quartz plate, and its size sets a hard ceiling on how large a single chip can be. High-NA optics buy resolution by narrowing the printed field, which makes that ceiling lower, not higher — precisely the wrong direction for AI accelerators, which are among the largest chips ever manufactured. A 12-inch mask is the industry’s way of buying the field back.

    For anyone buying AI compute rather than making it, the through-line is cost per die. If large accelerators can be printed in one exposure on a next-generation tool instead of being stitched together or broken into smaller chiplets, the economics of every downstream layer — server, rack, data centre, inference price — shift in the buyer’s favour, eventually.

    The Mask, Not the Machine, Is the Constraint

    Standard lithography prints an exposure field of roughly 26 by 33 millimetres, and the size of a single chip cannot exceed it. That is the ‘reticle limit’, and the largest AI accelerators and their high-bandwidth memory stacks have been pressed against it for years. High-NA EUV improves resolution using anamorphic optics that magnify differently in each direction, and the price of that trick is a printed field roughly half the conventional size. A foundry adopting High-NA for critical layers therefore inherits a smaller canvas at exactly the moment its most valuable customers want a larger one.

    Moving the mask from 6 inches to 12 inches attacks that directly: a bigger stencil is what allows a bigger field to be projected in a single exposure. The engineering consequences ripple outward — mask blanks, pellicles, writing tools, inspection and repair equipment, scanner stages and reticle handling all assume the incumbent format. That is why a joint TSMC-ASML effort matters more than a unilateral one. Mask formats are effectively an industry standard, and standards move when the largest buyer and the sole tool supplier move together.

    AI Accelerator Economics Are Driving the Roadmap

    Historically, lithography generations were pulled forward by mobile and PC volumes, where the metric that mattered was transistors per dollar across hundreds of millions of small dies. The demand now being cited for these tools comes from a different shape of customer: relatively low unit volumes of extremely large, extremely expensive dies sold into data centres. For that customer, yield loss on a big die is brutal — defects scale with area — and every millimetre of printable field is margin.

    This is also a reminder of where the bottleneck in the AI buildout actually sits. Public attention fixes on power and cooling, and those are real constraints. But the supply of leading-edge accelerators is gated upstream by a single Dutch tool vendor’s output and by the willingness of two or three foundries to commit capital years ahead of revenue. TSMC’s capital cadence remains visible in its filings — in a 6-K filed with the SEC on September 1, the company adjusted its first-quarter 2026 cash dividend to NT$7.00000137 per common share, payable October 8, following a board-approved distribution of NT$181.5 billion — a reminder that this capital intensity coexists with substantial cash returns to shareholders.

    Who Gains, and What Has to Go Right

    ASML is the clearest beneficiary. It has no competitor in EUV, and commitments from both leading foundries convert High-NA from a technology bet into a platform with a customer base. TSMC gains optionality: it can keep extending existing EUV with multiple patterning where that is cheaper, and deploy High-NA where the layer count justifies it, while shaping the mask format that its own largest customers will design against. Samsung’s commitment is competitively significant on different terms — foundry share is won partly on the credibility of the next node, and being absent from the next lithography platform would have been a liability.

    The risks are not trivial. Larger masks mean larger, heavier, more expensive reticles moving through a machine whose overlay budget is measured in fractions of a nanometre; a 12-inch blank supply chain has to be built and qualified; and the mask ecosystem’s inspection and repair tooling has to follow. There is also a live alternative. The industry’s current answer to the reticle limit is disaggregation — splitting a large chip into chiplets and reassembling them in advanced packaging. If packaging keeps improving quickly, some of the value of a bigger field is captured elsewhere. The likeliest outcome is that both paths advance together, with larger single-exposure dies making the packaged modules themselves more capable.

    Background

    ASML, based in Veldhoven in the Netherlands, is the world’s only manufacturer of extreme ultraviolet lithography systems, the machines that print the finest features on leading-edge chips. Its equipment is therefore a chokepoint for the entire advanced semiconductor industry, and a recurring subject of export-control policy. TSMC is the largest contract chipmaker in the world, manufacturing processors designed by others, including most of the leading AI accelerators. Samsung Electronics runs both its own memory and logic products and a foundry business competing with TSMC for external customers.

    The photomask format at issue has been stable for decades: 6-inch square plates, with a standard exposure field that fixes the maximum size of any single chip. That constraint was largely academic when the industry’s economics were driven by small mobile and PC processors. It became a first-order commercial problem once AI accelerators, built as the largest practical dies and surrounded by stacked memory, became the most profitable products in the industry.

    Sources

    Source: ASML and TSMC plan larger masks to expand High-NA chipmaking — report that ASML and TSMC intend to adopt 12-inch photomasks to widen the printable field of High-NA EUV systems.

    Primary sources: Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, Form 6-K filed September 1, 2026 (adjustment to cash dividend per share); ASML Wins Over Top Chipmakers for New EUV Machines — Bloomberg; TSMC, Samsung commit to ASML’s newest chipmaking tools as AI drives demand — CNBC; TSMC, ASML partner on 12-inch EUV photomasks for advanced chips — Focus Taiwan; ASML wins commitments from Samsung, TSMC for new chipmaking gear — Seeking Alpha; ASML and TSMC plan bigger masks that could lower chipmaking costs — Stock Titan.

  • Anthropic Joins 5 Custom-Chip Builders: Nvidia’s Exposure Is Inference, Not Training

    Anthropic Joins 5 Custom-Chip Builders: Nvidia’s Exposure Is Inference, Not Training

    TL;DR · 30-second read

    The Short Version

    Anthropic, the company behind the Claude chatbot, is starting to design its own computer chips for running its AI. Samsung is reportedly in talks to build them.

    Today most AI runs on chips from Nvidia, which are expensive and use a lot of electricity. Google, Amazon, Meta, Microsoft and OpenAI already make their own chips.

    What most people miss is that these custom chips are built to answer people’s questions, not to create new AI models. Creating new models still mostly happens on Nvidia hardware. Nvidia’s rivals are winning ground on the everyday work of answering requests.

    Anthropic is building an in-house chip development team to co-design custom ASICs (application-specific integrated circuits, chips built for one kind of job) to run its Claude models. The company told Business Insider it is co-designing the chips so that Claude can run faster and more efficiently at the scale its customers need. It is hiring engineers now, and the job listing stresses delivering the design on schedule. Tom’s Hardware reported the development on August 7, 2026. It added that The Information had reported in July that Anthropic was in talks with Samsung to manufacture the chips.

    Anthropic has not named its design partner. No chip specifications, production volumes or deployment dates have been disclosed.

    Executive Summary

    Anthropic is the latest frontier AI developer to pursue its own silicon. Google, Amazon, Meta, Microsoft and OpenAI already have custom chip programs. The chips are aimed at inference, which is the work of running a trained model to answer requests. They are not aimed at training, the far more compute-intensive process of building the model in the first place.

    That distinction matters more than the headline rivalry with Nvidia. Training advanced models still depends heavily on Nvidia GPUs. Inference can run on a much wider range of hardware, and its cost recurs with every prompt a customer sends. For a company whose usage is growing quickly, especially from agentic AI that consumes many more tokens per task than a single chat exchange, inference is the line item that scales. It is therefore the one worth engineering down.

    The reported Samsung link adds a supply-chain dimension. Samsung is a small player in custom chip co-design, but it brings manufacturing capacity and memory. Memory is one of the scarcest inputs in AI hardware right now.

    Why Nvidia’s Exposure Sits in Inference, Not Training

    Every custom AI chip program disclosed so far aims first at running models, not building them. The economics explain why. Training a frontier model is an episodic, enormous job, and Nvidia’s GPUs and software ecosystem remain the default for it. Inference is continuous. Each question a user asks, and each step an AI agent takes, consumes compute. As usage grows, inference spending grows with it. Agentic workloads multiply the token count per task, so the growth is faster still.

    Inference also tolerates specialization. A chip that only needs to execute a known family of models efficiently can drop much of a general-purpose GPU’s flexibility. In exchange it gains lower power draw and lower cost per request. Estimates put custom silicon’s total cost of ownership advantage at up to 65% compared with Nvidia GPUs. That figure is a ceiling across the industry, not a disclosed number for Anthropic’s chip, which has no published specifications. Anthropic’s own stated goal is narrower and consistent with this reasoning: making Claude run faster and more efficiently at customer scale.

    For Nvidia, this means the pressure is concentrated in inference deployments. Each custom chip installed for inference displaces a GPU that would otherwise have done that work. Training, where Nvidia’s position is strongest, is not what these programs target. The large AI labs are also unlikely to become fully self-sufficient. Demand is growing too fast, and Nvidia retains strong control over access to the supply chain. The realistic outcome is mixed fleets, with GPUs for training and flexible workloads and in-house chips for high-volume serving.

    The Real Cost Is the Software, and the Years

    Designing a chip is only the visible part of the effort. A custom accelerator needs a full software stack, including compilers, runtimes and kernels, before it can run production models. The models themselves need tuning to exploit the hardware. That burden is why most companies sensibly buy general-purpose GPUs. Custom silicon only pays back at very large scale, where small per-request savings multiply across billions of requests.

    The reference point is sobering. Google has built its Tensor Processing Units for 12 years, with Broadcom as co-design partner on each generation. Amazon runs parallel Trainium and Inferentia lines. Meta has announced several MTIA designs for deployment through 2027. Anthropic is at the hiring stage, and its first chip will arrive into a market where rivals are several generations in. The job listing’s emphasis on schedule suggests the company understands this, but no delivery target has been disclosed.

    Samsung, Memory and a Concentrated Co-Design Market

    Custom AI chips are rarely designed alone. Broadcom and Marvell account for roughly 95% of the ASIC co-design market. Broadcom works with Google, OpenAI and Meta, as well as ByteDance and Fujitsu. It claims a $73 billion order backlog and expects more than $100 billion in annual AI chip revenue by the end of 2027. Marvell supports Amazon’s Trainium and Microsoft’s Maia and is expected to earn upward of $11 billion from co-design work in 2026. Whichever partner Anthropic has chosen for design, that partner is serving a crowded order book.

    Samsung’s reported role is manufacturing, and its appeal is not mainly design share. Samsung would bring fabrication capacity and chip design expertise. It would also bring access to memory, which is in short global supply. Modern AI accelerators depend on high-bandwidth memory (HBM) stacked alongside the processor. That memory, along with advanced packaging such as TSMC’s CoWoS, has been a practical limit on how many AI chips the industry can ship. A manufacturing partner that also makes memory could ease one of the tightest constraints a new chip program faces. Neither company has confirmed such an arrangement.

    What Changes for Data Center Operators

    For the facilities that host this hardware, custom inference chips add variety to planning. GPUs are power-hungry, and inference ASICs are built specifically to cut power per request. A fleet that mixes Nvidia GPUs with several in-house accelerators could bring different rack densities, cooling needs and networking layouts to the same campus. Operators serving the large AI labs should expect less standardization over the next few hardware cycles, not more.

    Background

    Anthropic develops the Claude family of AI models and sells access to consumers, businesses and government customers. It has grown quickly over the past year, and agentic AI, where models carry out multi-step tasks, has sharply increased the volume of computation each customer uses. Like other frontier labs, Anthropic runs its models on hardware from several suppliers, with Nvidia GPUs the industry’s default.

    Custom AI silicon has become standard practice among the largest AI companies and cloud providers, often called hyperscalers because of the scale of their data center fleets. The market for designing these chips is dominated by Broadcom and Marvell. Much of the manufacturing and advanced packaging runs through TSMC, and memory supply has become a key constraint.

    Sources

    Source: Anthropic co-designing custom AI inference chips to bypass costly Nvidia GPUs — Samsung reported as manufacturing partner for Claude maker (Tom’s Hardware): Tom’s Hardware’s report on Anthropic’s in-house inference chip team and its reported manufacturing talks with Samsung.