IT PROJECT MANAGEMENT & DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION | APRIL 2026
By the Black Tyger Strategies Team
Anthropic — one of the fastest-growing AI companies in the world, with run-rate revenue that jumped from roughly $9 billion at the end of 2025 to over $30 billion by early 2026 — is exploring whether to design its own AI chips. The company already uses chips from Google, Amazon, and Nvidia. It just signed a long-term deal with Google and Broadcom for next-generation processors. By any measure, it has strong supplier relationships.
And yet, it is still asking the question: what happens if those relationships change?
That question — asked quietly, before a crisis forces it — is one of the most important strategic questions any business leader can sit with. Because the businesses that survive supply chain disruptions are rarely the ones that respond best when things break. They are the ones that built optionality before anything broke at all.
The Hidden Cost of Supplier Dependency
Every business has a supply chain. For a manufacturer, it is raw materials and components. For a professional services firm, it is the platforms, tools, and talent pipelines that deliver client work. For an AI company like Anthropic, it is the semiconductor compute that powers everything. The specific form changes by industry. The underlying vulnerability is identical.
When your business depends on a single supplier — or a small cluster of suppliers — for something critical to your operations, you have not just created a vendor relationship. You have created a single point of failure. And single points of failure do not announce themselves in advance. They surface during a chip shortage, a geopolitical disruption, a contract renegotiation, a natural disaster, or a supplier decision to move upmarket and leave your tier of business behind.
Anthropic’s current strategy is instructive precisely because it reflects mature supply chain thinking: the company deliberately uses multiple chip platforms — Google’s TPUs, Amazon’s Trainium, and Nvidia’s GPUs — so it can, in their own words, match workloads to the chips best suited for them. That is not just an engineering decision. It is a resilience decision. No single supplier can hold the business hostage.
Single points of failure do not announce themselves in advance. They surface in the middle of your most critical delivery — when you have the least time and the fewest options to respond.
What Supply Chain Risk Actually Looks Like in Your Business
Supply chain risk in the AI industry is obvious — you cannot train models without chips, and chips are scarce, expensive, and geopolitically complicated. But the same structural vulnerability shows up in businesses that have never ordered a single semiconductor.
Consider how many of the following apply to your operation right now:
- A single cloud platform hosts all of your client-facing systems — if it goes down, you go down
- A single software vendor provides the tool your entire delivery team runs on — if they change their pricing, discontinue a feature, or get acquired, your workflow breaks
- A single staffing pipeline or hiring source provides the majority of your specialized talent — if that pipeline dries up, your capacity disappears
- A single logistics or fulfillment partner handles the last mile of your product delivery — if they have a service disruption, your clients feel it before you do
- A single key vendor relationship accounts for a disproportionate share of your operational capability — and that vendor knows it
None of these situations is inherently catastrophic. Every business makes trade-offs between efficiency and redundancy. Concentrating spend with a single supplier often gets you better pricing, deeper support, and a more streamlined operation. The problem is not the concentration — it is the absence of a deliberate plan for what happens when that concentration becomes a liability.
The Three Layers of Supply Chain Resilience
Building resilience into your supply chain does not mean duplicating every vendor relationship or carrying excess inventory you will never use. It means building three layers of protection that give your business options when the environment changes:
The first layer is visibility. You cannot manage risk you cannot see. Most businesses have a reasonable picture of their tier-one suppliers — the vendors they write checks to directly. Far fewer have visibility into tier-two dependencies: the suppliers their suppliers depend on, the platforms their platforms are built on, the infrastructure their infrastructure runs on. Anthropic’s chip dependency on Google is visible. Less visible is the dependency on TSMC’s manufacturing capacity that underlies those chips. Mapping your dependency chain two layers deep reveals vulnerabilities that standard vendor reviews never surface.
The second layer is optionality. Anthropic’s multi-chip strategy is a textbook example of built-in optionality — no single supplier can disrupt the entire operation because the operation was never designed around a single supplier. For your business, this means identifying your highest-criticality dependencies and actively maintaining relationships with at least one alternative, even if you are not currently using it. The cost of maintaining an inactive backup relationship is almost always lower than the cost of finding one under pressure.
The third layer is response planning. Resilient businesses have thought through, in advance, what they would do if a critical supplier relationship broke down tomorrow. Not in theory — in practice. Which clients would be affected, in what order? What is the communication plan? What is the workaround, and how long does it buy you? Organizations that have rehearsed these scenarios respond in hours. Organizations that have not respond in weeks — and their clients notice the difference.
Resilience is not built during a crisis. It is built in the quiet periods when everything is working — which is precisely when most businesses stop thinking about it.
Technology as Both the Risk and the Solution
There is an irony worth naming here: for most modern businesses, technology is simultaneously the primary source of supply chain risk and the most powerful tool for managing it.
The platforms your business runs on — your CRM, your ERP, your project management tools, your communication infrastructure — are supplier relationships with exactly the same vulnerability profile as any physical supply chain. When a SaaS platform changes its API, sunsets a feature, or gets acquired and migrates to a new product, your operations feel it. If you have not built around open standards, maintained data portability, or tested your migration paths, you are as exposed as a manufacturer with a single-source component.
At the same time, well-designed technology architecture is what gives a business the real-time visibility, the automated alerting, and the operational flexibility to detect and respond to supply chain stress before it becomes a supply chain failure. The difference between a business that weathers a disruption and one that is defined by it is almost always a function of how much visibility the leadership team had and how quickly they could act on it.
What Anthropic’s Chip Question Means for Every Business Leader
Anthropic is not exploring custom chip design because its current chip suppliers are failing it. Google, Amazon, and Nvidia are all delivering. The exploration is happening because Anthropic’s leadership understands something that every growth-stage business eventually learns: the supplier relationships that got you here may not be the ones that can scale with where you are going — and the time to plan for that is before you need a different answer.
Designing an AI chip from scratch carries a price tag of roughly half a billion dollars in engineering and manufacturing investment. That is the cost of true vertical integration at the frontier of technology. Your equivalent investment is almost certainly a fraction of that — but the strategic logic is identical. At what point does your dependency on an external supplier become a constraint on your growth, your margins, or your ability to serve clients the way you want to serve them?
At Black Tyger Strategies, supply chain resilience is a technology and strategy problem simultaneously. We help businesses map their operational dependencies, identify their highest-risk single points of failure, build the technology architecture that creates optionality, and develop the response plans that turn disruption from a crisis into a managed transition.
Anthropic asked the right question at the right time. The best time for your business to ask it is before the answer becomes urgent.
Want to understand where your single points of failure are — and what it would take to build real resilience around them? Let’s map it together.
Black Tyger Strategies is a Full Stack Digital Solutions Business Development Consultancy specializing in IT Project Management, Custom Software Development, Digital Transformation Consulting, and Cybersecurity & Risk Management.