TSMC plans up to $1 billion investment in OpenAI and Anthropic

In short: TSMC, the world’s biggest contract chipmaker, approved plans to invest up to $1 billion in OpenAI and Anthropic.

What happened

TSMC’s board approved a plan to invest up to $500 million in OpenAI and up to $500 million in Anthropic, according to Reuters. The OpenAI investment would be in preferred stock, which is a type of share often reserved for large investors. The Anthropic investment would be in common shares, priced at what Reuters described as Anthropic’s expected IPO price (an IPO is when a company first sells its stock to the public).

TSMC is best known for manufacturing chips designed by other companies. It produces most of Nvidia’s chips used for AI data centers, and it makes many of Apple’s custom chips used in iPhones and Macs. Most of TSMC’s factories are in Taiwan, and it also operates factories in Japan and China, is expanding in Arizona, and is building a new plant in Germany.

The move also highlights “circular financing,” a pattern in the AI boom where the same group of companies are both doing business with each other and investing in each other. In simple terms, it can look like a closed loop where money goes from investor to supplier to customer, and back again (like a mall where the stores own shares in the companies that supply them).

Why it matters

When major suppliers like TSMC invest directly in the AI companies buying their hardware, it can make the AI market look stronger than it really is, and harder to measure. At the same time, TSMC has the cash to make these bets after reporting multiple quarters of record profit, including more than $23 billion in profit in the July to September 2026 quarter, according to Reuters.

Source: Arstechnica