Anthropic discussed buying chip startup MatX for about $7 billion, then dropped the purchase, Reuters reported Thursday in an exclusive. Two people briefed on the matter told Reuters the talks were meant to speed Anthropic’s work on custom chips for its AI business. A third person said the conversation has shifted to a possible partnership.
Reuters said it was reporting the discussions for the first time and could not learn why the acquisition talks went quiet. Anthropic declined to comment on deal talks with MatX. MatX did not respond to a request for comment.
MatX was founded by former Google tensor processing unit engineers. One of the people said the startup is now seeking fresh capital at a valuation of about $4 billion. Buying a firm like MatX would have given Anthropic in-house chip-design talent and, over the longer term, a way to cut costs, the people told Reuters. MatX has been working on a processor aimed at training large AI models.
Anthropic is already trying to build that capability itself. Reuters said the company is expanding an in-house silicon team to design chips that would run Claude models faster and more efficiently, while keeping a multi-chip mix that still includes hardware from Nvidia and Google. Designing a chip can take a year or more. A single generation can cost hundreds of millions of dollars. The lab has been hiring for that work. Reuters said Anthropic hired Google chip veteran Amir Salek this week and, in June, former OpenAI chip engineer Clive Chan.
In recent weeks Anthropic has also held meetings with other AI chip startups and has not chosen an approach, Reuters reported. This is not a signed acquisition. It is a walk-away, with a partnership still on the table, while the in-house team is built the slow way.
A $7 billion check would have bought a shortcut. Anthropic put the check away. The silicon calendar did not move.
Sources