TSMC to invest up to $1 billion in Anthropic, OpenAI

Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company said on Tuesday that its board approved investing up to $500 million in Anthropic's common shares at the IPO price and up to $500 million in OpenAI's preferred stock, according to Yahoo Finance. The same board meeting approved a $40.9 billion capital expenditure plan covering advanced chip manufacturing, packaging, plant construction and 2027 research and development investments, and a quarterly dividend of NT$9.0, up from NT$7.0 in the second quarter.

The Anthropic and OpenAI stakes come as both AI companies develop their own custom chips for running AI models. IO+ reported, citing Seoul Economic Daily and Taiwanese media, that the stakes are meant to deepen TSMC's computing alliances. Taiwanese commentators see the equity ties as a way for TSMC to reduce its reliance on Nvidia, which accounts for a very large share of its revenue, and to gain more leverage over how scarce capacity is allocated and priced.

Anthropic said Tuesday that it will sell shares at $70 to $78 apiece in its initial public offering, aiming to raise more than $63 billion at the higher end, Yahoo Finance reported. The Claude maker's IPO will open next week, and its filing shows plans to raise $26 billion from big investors including Alphabet, AMD and TSMC. IO+ noted that Anthropic's offering filing lists TSMC among the investors in that separate $26 billion private placement, alongside Google, Nvidia, AMD, Broadcom, Micron and Microsoft.

TSMC is also setting up a dedicated investment company with up to $500 million to take strategic stakes across the semiconductor industry and its wider ecosystem, IO+ reported. The vehicle was described in a filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission only as an investment company for strategic investments in the semiconductor industry and related ecosystem. TSMC has not yet named which companies it will target or explained how quickly it will deploy the money.

The new fund is roughly three times the size of TSMC's VentureTech Alliance fund of around $165 million, which was founded in 2001 and has backed early-stage chip startups including SiMa.ai, Ayar Labs and Ethernovia, IO+ said. The company has said it has supported close to 1,000 startup customers through access to its factories and design ecosystem. IO+ described the new vehicle as a more ambitious approach: owning a piece of the companies that design, package and depend on its chips, rather than only manufacturing for them.

Markets reacted to the announcements. Yahoo Finance reported that US-listed TSM shares advanced 5% in premarket trading on Wednesday, while the Taipei-listed stock closed 4.8% higher. TSMC earlier reported that its October sales rose 60% to NT$586.9 billion ($17.9 billion), compared with 51% growth in the September quarter, and Yahoo Finance noted that analysts polled by Bloomberg expect 63% growth in the current quarter.