By Max A. Cherney and Krystal Hu
SAN FRANCISCO, Aug 27 (Reuters) – Anthropic discussed buying artificial intelligence chip startup MatX for roughly $7 billion, seeking to accelerate efforts to develop custom hardware for its fast-growing AI business, two people briefed on the matter told Reuters.
The merger talks, which a third person said have evolved into a discussion about a partnership, underscore the AI lab’s ambition to secure the resources and talent needed to build its own chips. The goal is to help Anthropic accelerate its in-house chip development.
Reuters is reporting on the discussions for the first time but could not learn why the talks are no longer active. MatX, founded by former Google tensor processing unit (TPU) engineers, is now seeking to raise new capital at a valuation of about $4 billion, one of the people said, requesting anonymity to discuss private matters.
Anthropic declined to comment on deal talks with MatX. MatX did not respond to a request for comment.
The discussions with MatX also suggest Anthropic may be interested in producing a training chip, while other chip startups and rival OpenAI pursue processors that are better suited to generating responses from chatbots, a process known as inference. Anthropic could elect to produce an inference chip as well, the sources said.
In recent weeks, Anthropic held meetings with a range of AI chip startups as the company seeks to hone its efforts to produce a specialized AI chip. It has not yet elected to make an acquisition. The meetings are an attempt by Anthropic’s engineers and executives to understand the current range of chip design approaches.
This week, Anthropic hired Google chip veteran Amir Salek as part of the company’s push into hardware. In June, the AI lab hired former OpenAI chip engineer Clive Chan who worked on the OpenAI chip unveiled earlier this year.
The leading AI labs such as Anthropic and OpenAI have become increasingly focused on custom chips, which can be tailored to their models and workloads. Through this, they hope to create significant performance and economic advantages.
At a conference this week OpenAI boasted that its first custom chip called Jalapeno outperformed a similar processor made by Nvidia. OpenAI executives noted that the chip was more energy efficient in performing inference calculations.
(Reporting by Max A. Cherney and Krystal Hu in San Francisco; Editing by David Gregorio)
