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The Chipmaker Buys Into Its Customers: TSMC Caps Stakes in Anthropic and OpenAI at $500 Million Each
By Clara Ledger
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Photo: Photo: Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 4.0)
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co.’s board has approved authority to invest up to US$500 million in Anthropic and up to US$500 million in OpenAI.
The important words are up to.
These are ceilings approved by TSMC’s board, not completed purchases.
TSMC’s board met on November 10, 2026. Its resolutions, posted by the company and included in an SEC Form 6-K, authorize an investment of up to US$500 million in Anthropic common shares at the IPO price and up to US$500 million in OpenAI Group PBC preferred stock.
The resolutions establish the maximum amounts TSMC may invest under those approvals. They do not establish that either purchase has been completed.
On Anthropic, the timing is particularly clear. The company’s November 10 S-1/A sets a proposed IPO range of $70 to $78 a share for 825 million shares, implying gross proceeds of up to approximately $64.35 billion at the top of the range. The proposed Nasdaq ticker is ANT.
The IPO has not yet been priced and the registration statement is not yet effective.
That means TSMC’s US$500 million authorization is not a completed US$500 million cheque. It is an approved maximum connected to a transaction whose final public offering price has not yet been set.
Using the $74 midpoint of Anthropic’s filed range, a US$500 million allocation would work out to approximately 6,756,756 shares. That is arithmetic based on the midpoint, not a disclosed final allocation.
TSMC is also named as part of Anthropic’s concurrent private placement, in which seven companies are placing a combined US$26 billion. TSMC’s portion works out to approximately US$500 million. Again, the board authorization is a ceiling, while the Anthropic offering itself remains unpriced.
The OpenAI authorization is even less specific in the board record.
TSMC approved up to US$500 million for preferred stock in OpenAI Group PBC, but the resolution names no funding round, no share price and no investment date.
Those omissions matter. The authorization establishes how much TSMC’s board is willing to permit under the approval. It does not establish the price at which OpenAI preferred stock would be bought, when a transaction would occur or whether the full US$500 million will ultimately be deployed.
Nor does either authorization, on the facts available here, establish a board seat, a supply agreement or an exclusive commercial arrangement.
No motive is stated in the board resolutions.
The two investment ceilings also sit inside a much larger set of capital decisions.
The same November 10 board package approved US$40,926.70 million in capital expenditures and a separate US$500 million investment-company cap.
The scale of those figures is worth keeping distinct. The Anthropic and OpenAI approvals are each US$500 million maximum authorizations. They are not the same thing as the more than US$40.9 billion of capital expenditure approvals.
TSMC’s underlying financial scale provides further context.
For the third quarter of 2026, TSMC reported revenue of NT$1,494.24 billion, or US$45.50 billion, and net income of NT$763.06 billion, or US$23.23 billion. Earnings per share were NT$29.43, and net income was up 50.9% year over year, according to the company’s reported figures.
The board also approved a dividend of NT$9.00 per share.
For October 2026, TSMC reported revenue of NT$586.89 billion, up 59.7% from a year earlier.
Those operating numbers explain the scale on which the board is making capital decisions. They do not, however, convert an investment authorization into a completed transaction.
The clean accounting is therefore straightforward.
Anthropic: up to US$500 million authorized, with the IPO still unpriced.
OpenAI: up to US$500 million authorized, with no round, price or date named in the approval.
A ceiling tells the market how far the board has authorized the company to go.
It does not tell us that the company has already gone there.
Clara Ledger
Markets Desk, The Library Media
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