Micron, Samsung, and SK hynix have made a historic first joint appearance on the same AI company's funding list.
On May 28 local time, Anthropic announced the completion of its Series H funding round, raising a total of $65 billion at a post-money valuation of $965 billion. This officially surpasses OpenAI's previous valuation of $852 billion, making Anthropic the world's most valuable AI company.
The scale of this funding round is staggering in itself. However, what truly made the industry stop and take notice is an unprecedented combination on the list of investors: Micron, Samsung, and SK hynix—currently the world's only three manufacturers of high-bandwidth memory (HBM)—appeared simultaneously as shareholders in the same AI company for the first time.
These three companies have historically been each other's most direct competitors, vying for the same orders from NVIDIA, AMD, and Google, fighting inch by inch for market share in each generation of HBM. Yet now, they sit at the same table, endorsing the same AI company.
The Logic of "Strategic Lock-in" for the Supply Chain
In its official announcement, Anthropic referred to Micron, Samsung, and SK hynix as "strategic infrastructure partners," not ordinary financial investors. The specific investment amounts from the three companies were not disclosed. However, being officially singled out as "strategic infrastructure partners" itself signifies a status exceeding that of most follow-on investment institutions on the list, indicating that the logic of this investment lies not in financial returns but in supply chain synergy. The official wording states: These relationships will help Anthropic "reliably scale compute capacity at the pace our customers need."
The meaning of this statement needs to be understood within the current industry context.
By 2026, HBM is no longer a commodity that can be restocked at any time; it is one of the scarcest strategic resources in the global AI arms race. The annual production capacity of the three suppliers was already fully booked in Q1 2026, with an estimated supply-demand gap between 20% and 50%. The shortage is expected to persist until 2028. SK hynix holds approximately 50% market share, while Samsung and Micron hold about 28% and 22%, respectively.
In such an environment of extreme supply constraints, whoever secures enough HBM can support the training and inference of large-scale AI models. This funding round by Anthropic has disclosed commitments including $50 billion from Amazon and a total of $150 billion from other hyperscale cloud service providers, along with locking in a new 5 GW compute agreement with Amazon, 5 GW of next-generation TPU compute from Google and Broadcom, and access rights to the SpaceX Colossus GPU cluster.
The issue of compute supply has a preliminary solution, but HBM, the core raw material for compute, remains a bottleneck. Having the three memory chip giants invest simultaneously essentially builds a competitive barrier at the supply chain level: not paying for goods, but making upstream manufacturers direct stakeholders in a community of interest.
Why the Three Giants Are Willing to Place a Joint Bet
From the perspective of the three companies, this investment also aligns with their respective strategic logic.
SK hynix is the primary supplier of HBM4 for NVIDIA's Rubin platform, accounting for about 70% of supply. HBM revenue already exceeds 50% of its total revenue, with gross margins estimated at 55% to 60%—about double that of regular DRAM. For SK hynix, deep alignment with Anthropic means establishing a stable, long-term demand anchor on the AI inference side. Anthropic's compute expansion drives cloud providers to purchase GPUs, and the bottleneck in GPU production capacity lies with HBM. This transmission chain is precisely the link where SK hynix, as NVIDIA's primary HBM4 supplier, holds the strongest control.
Samsung, between 2024 and 2025, was denied supply by NVIDIA due to HBM3E yield issues, only returning to the market in February 2026 with HBM4 mass production. Previously, Samsung secured the primary supply qualification for HBM4 on AMD's MI455X platform and captured over 60% share in Google TPU orders. Betting on Anthropic is a crucial step for Samsung in building a diversified customer portfolio in the "post-NVIDIA era."
Micron is the smallest of the three in size but possesses the most unique strategic value. As the only U.S.-based HBM manufacturer, Micron enjoys approximately $6.1 billion in subsidies under the CHIPS Act, giving it an irreplaceable "domestic attribute" in the increasingly complex geopolitical global compute landscape. Its HBM annualized revenue run rate reached $8 billion in Q4 FY2025.
For these three companies, jointly investing in Anthropic is a way to "actively participate in defining the future form of AI." The compute demand specifications of large AI models will be transmitted up the supply chain from GPUs to memory chips, directly influencing the evolution of memory architecture, bandwidth specifications, and packaging technology. Becoming a shareholder means gaining the opportunity to grasp these demand signals earlier, thereby influencing the direction of next-generation HBM specifications.
Rewriting the Underlying Ecology
Viewed in isolation, this funding round could easily be interpreted as an exceptionally large-scale venture capital investment. But when placed within the broader context of the AI industry over the past 18 months, a larger picture emerges.
Anthropic's annualized revenue surged from $30 billion in early April to $47 billion currently, in less than two months—a growth rate that insiders describe as "never seen before." Claude has become the world's first frontier AI model simultaneously available on the three major platforms: Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure. The explosive growth of Claude Code is reshaping the enterprise development tools market. Anthropic anticipates its first profitable quarter, which, for an AI company just a few years old, marks a new stage of business model maturity.
Simultaneously, the investment focus of the entire AI industry is shifting. A few years ago, capital mainly focused on the model capability race; now, the key variables determining the competitive landscape are increasingly concentrated at the infrastructure layer: compute, storage, networking, and power. Hyperscale cloud service providers, chip manufacturers, and energy companies are starting to enter AI company shareholder structures directly. This trend of "vertical integration" essentially reflects the supply chain being reconfigured as an ecosystem moat.
From OpenAI backed by Microsoft, to Google betting on in-house TPUs, and now the three major memory chip suppliers simultaneously investing in Anthropic, the dimensions of competition in the AI industry have expanded from "whose model is better" to "who controls a more complete compute supply chain."
This restructuring didn't happen suddenly, but it appears particularly clear at this moment in 2026: AI large models have evolved from lab products to critical production infrastructure, and the supporting upstream hardware supply chain is completing its deep integration with the model layer through equity stakes.
The Series H funding will build a broad moat for Anthropic before its IPO. Yet more noteworthy than the funding scale itself is the industrial logic revealed by this investor list: when the three memory chip giants set aside market competition and take seats as shareholders in the same AI company, they are essentially casting a vote with real money for the entire industry. AI's dependence on underlying hardware has reached a level significant enough to reshape strategic supply chain relationships.
This is not the end of AI, but the starting point for a new round of ecosystem game theory after AI becomes infrastructure. (This article was first published on the Titanium Media APP, written by | Silicon Valley Tech_news, edited by | Qin Conghui)
