Anthropic has reportedly discussed the prospect of buying artificial intelligence (AI) chip startup MatX for approximately USD 7 billion, seeking to accelerate efforts to develop custom hardware for its fast-growing AI business.
The merger talks, as per Reuters, have now evolved into a discussion about a partnership, as Anthropic, to stay ahead of its rivals like ChatGPT-maker OpenAI, is looking to secure the resources and talent needed to build its own chips and produce them in large quantities.
MatX, founded by former Google tensor processing unit (TPU) engineers, is reportedly seeking to raise new capital at a valuation of about USD 4 billion.
As Anthropic scales its Claude family of AI models, the company is looking to produce hardware that can fulfill the AI model’s appetite for data consumption while reducing its reliance on Nvidia-made chips.
Anthropic, apart from generating interest around its maiden IPO, has hired a pool of engineering and executive talents to accelerate the chip design process. Anthropic’s IPO will chase a valuation of USD 2 trillion, which reportedly hinges on a 2028 revenue figure of approximately USD 200 billion.
Apart from MatX’s possible acquisition, Anthropic is also expanding its in-house silicon team, with the task of designing custom chips that will allow Claude models to run faster and more efficiently.
While the process of designing a chip takes a year or more, design costs for a single generation alone can range around hundreds of millions of dollars.
An acquisition of an AI chip startup such as MatX would give Anthropic in-house design expertise and could help lower costs over the longer term.
MatX has reportedly been working on a chip that would be useful for building large AI models, especially during training phases.
“Anthropic plans to spend tens of billions of dollars to rent computing power from cloud providers and also plans to buy chips directly. It plans to buy USD 36 billion worth of Google’s AI chips and signed a USD 45 billion deal to rent AI cloud computing power from Nscale. It agreed to pay SpaceX USD 1.25 billion per month through May 2029 for computing capacity across its data center clusters,” Google reported.