Up to $1 billion. That is what TSMC’s board approved on Tuesday to put into the two leading AI developers: as much as $500 million for preferred stock in OpenAI, in an allotment reserved for large investors, and as much as $500 million for Anthropic common shares at the latter’s expected IPO price, as Ars Technica reported, citing Reuters. Both figures are ceilings, not transfers already made.
The buyer is not a fund. TSMC’s fabrication plants physically produce the vast majority of Nvidia’s chips for AI data-center workloads and most of Apple’s custom silicon — the iPhone and Mac chips plus Apple’s planned AI server chip. Most of those fabs sit in Taiwan, with others in Japan and China, an expanding cluster in Arizona and a new fab under construction in Germany. The AI data-center buildout has already made that contract chipmaking business enormously profitable. The company is now recycling a slice of those profits into equity in two of the companies whose orders drive it.
The loop
Trace the money. Anthropic and OpenAI commit to huge cloud-compute contracts; the cloud providers buy Nvidia GPUs; Nvidia pays TSMC to manufacture them; TSMC now buys shares in Anthropic and OpenAI. Last November, Microsoft and Nvidia said they would invest up to $15 billion in Anthropic while Anthropic committed to spending $30 billion on Microsoft’s cloud, per Reuters’ account.
Anthropic -- $30B compute commitment -----> Microsoft Microsoft -- GPU orders ----------------> Nvidia Nvidia -- wafer orders --------------> TSMC TSMC -- up to $500M at IPO price --> Anthropic TSMC -- up to $500M preferred -----> OpenAI
The diagram is why the dollar figure matters less than the direction. At the Anthropic half’s size, TSMC would be buying roughly 0.04% of the company if the IPO prices near the $1.4 trillion valuation in Anthropic’s draft prospectus, seen by Reuters — a target in a draft, not a price any market has paid. The same prospectus has a separate $26 billion private placement from cornerstone investors including Google, Nvidia and AMD: the chip supplier, the chip designer and a cloud customer, all buying into the same cap table. OpenAI, meanwhile, has itself delayed an IPO while seeking $30 billion at around a $1.4 trillion valuation.
TSMC’s entry may give markets ‘a shot of confidence as the artificial-intelligence trade shows signs of strain,’ The Wall Street Journal reported. Analysts quoted in the same report warned that circular financing among investors, suppliers and customers has made it difficult to evaluate real market demand for AI hardware and services. That warning is now illustrated by the world’s largest contract chipmaker taking stakes in the customers of its largest customer.
One participant in the loop has already talked about stepping back. Nvidia finalized a $30 billion investment in OpenAI — down from the $100 billion deal the two announced in September 2025 — and put $10 billion into Anthropic, and chief executive Jensen Huang said these might be the firm’s last investments of that kind, per The Star’s report. The numbers to watch next: Anthropic’s actual IPO price against the $1.4 trillion draft, and whether OpenAI’s preferred-stock round fills on the terms TSMC signed up for.