Taiwan’s chipmaking giant TSMC to invest $1B in Anthropic, OpenAI

Brief overview

TSMC's board approved an investment of up to $500 million in OpenAI preferred stock and Anthropic common stock, which will purchase at the expected IPO price. This move will inject confidence into the market, but analysts warn that the circular financing between investors, suppliers, and customers makes it difficult to assess the true market demand for AI hardware and services.

Same story2 other outlets also reported this

36Kr · AI·19:56·First
TSMC's board approves the subscription of OpenAI's preferred stock up to $500 million
ITHome · AI·11 Nov, 15:02·+19 h 5 min
TSMC approves a maximum $1 billion investment plan for Anthropic and OpenAI.
Ars Technica · AI·12 Nov, 02:16·+30 h 20 min·Reading now
TSMC plans to invest $1 billion in Anthropic and OpenAI
Adds:Ars Technica mentions the analyst warning about the difficulty in assessing the real market demand for AI hardware and services.

In order of publication · later reports are added as they appear · Compared by AI from each outlet’s title and summary

Article

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.