Samsung's Double Bid: Anthropic's Foundry Talks and a Korea Memory Rebound

Anthropic Wants a Foundry Customer

On July 2, The Information reported that Anthropic is in early talks with Samsung to manufacture a custom AI chip, eyeing Samsung's 2-nanometer foundry process and advanced packaging. It's the Samsung-specific piece of this move, and it isn't random: of the three memory names that joined Anthropic's May Series H as strategic infrastructure partners — Samsung, SK Hynix, Micron — only Samsung runs both a memory business and a logic foundry.

That matters because the foundry is the weak link in the Samsung story. Per the Korea Herald, Samsung held roughly 4% of the global foundry market in Q1 2026 against TSMC's 38%, and is trying to claw back to profitability by 2028. A marquee AI lab locking in as a 2nm customer would be a real dent in that gap. The move also rhymes with the broader trend of model labs designing their own silicon to cut Nvidia dependence — think OpenAI's Broadcom-built inference chip.

The caveat traders should hold onto: this is preliminary. Anthropic hasn't reached design, testing, or manufacturing, and is still shopping multiple chip-design firms. It's a credible bid, not a signed deal.

It Wasn't Just Samsung

The cleaner read on the 8%-plus Seoul session is that Korea's entire memory complex rebounded. On July 3 the KOSPI closed up 5.76%, with Samsung +8.22% and SK Hynix +10.88%, unwinding a near-10% two-day drop.

The fundamentals underneath are pricing power. Samsung and SK Hynix are pushing DRAM prices higher — up to 20% for downstream clients, with server-DRAM contracts reportedly negotiated as high as 70% — while simultaneously squeezing upstream substrate suppliers on cost. That two-sided margin story is backed by AI demand and a supply deficit the sell side sees running through 2027. Samsung also detailed a roughly $90B (140 trillion won) AI-era semiconductor capex plan.

So attribute carefully: a large share of SMSN's move is beta to the DRAM pricing-power trade lifting every Korean memory name, not a clean, isolated reaction to the Anthropic headline.

Why the Perp Is Running Ahead of Seoul

SMSN tracks one Samsung common share, converted from KRW to USD at the prevailing FX rate, so the perp and the Seoul tape don't have to line up. They didn't: the perp is up 13.49% over 23 hours versus Samsung's single-session +8.22% close in Seoul.

Most of that gap is mechanical. The perp discovers price continuously — through the overnight window and after the Anthropic story landed — while Seoul prints once a day, and roughly $60M of daily perp volume is thin enough to amplify the excess, on top of any USD/KRW drift. Net: the underlying rebound has real fundamental legs, but the perp's premium over the Seoul close is continuous-book behavior, not a separate re-rate.

The next hard test is dated. Samsung reports Q2 earnings on July 23, and positioning is already leaning bullish, with Citi recently lifting its target to 530,000 won. Until then, this is a recovery that ran a little hot on a thin book.