Anthropic weighed $7B acquisition of chip startup MatX before pivoting to partnership
机器之心 · wechat · 2026-08-29
Reuters exclusively reports Anthropic discussed acquiring AI chip startup MatX for $7B to accelerate in-house silicon, but the deal stalled and talks shifted to a potential partnership. MatX, founded in 2023 by two Google TPU veterans (software and hardware), raised a $500M Series B in February and focuses on LLM training chips — contrasting with OpenAI's inference-first Jalapeño, suggesting Anthropic's interest extends into training silicon.
Anthropic's chip push is systematic: recent meetings with multiple chip startups to survey architectures, an internal chip team led by former Google TPU chief Amir Salek (who drove the first seven TPU generations), and the earlier hire of ex-OpenAI chip engineer Clive Chan. It still plans a multi-chip strategy with Nvidia and Google. With advanced chip design costing hundreds of millions per generation and taking over a year, acquiring a mature startup is a fast path to design expertise.
Related event: Anthropic Dropped $7B Bid for Chip Startup MatX, Now Talks Partnership(3 posts)→
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