Anthropic Tells IPO Investors Claude Is Speeding Up Work on Its Custom AI Chips

Some of those people said Anthropic's engineers have found that Claude cuts the time needed to design chips, compared with their estimates of how long traditional workflows take at large chip designers such as Nvidia and Advanced Micro Devices. The Information did not publish specific time savings, and Anthropic has not commented publicly on the report.

The pitch comes as Anthropic heads towards an IPO later this month that could value it at around $1.5 trillion, according to the report. Investors in the offering have been weighing the company's rapid revenue growth against heavy spending on computing capacity, which pushed it to an operating loss in its latest quarter.

A Push Into Silicon

Anthropic said earlier this year that it is expanding an in-house silicon team to design custom chips so that Claude models can run faster and more efficiently, while keeping a multi-chip approach that includes suppliers from Nvidia to Google, according to Reuters. In August, Reuters reported that Anthropic had discussed buying AI chip startup MatX for roughly $7 billion, citing two people briefed on the matter, and that the talks later turned to a possible partnership. Anthropic declined to comment on those talks at the time.

The company has also been hiring chip talent. It brought on Amir Salek, a Google chip veteran, in August, and in June hired Clive Chan, a former OpenAI chip engineer, Reuters reported. Chip design can take a year or more, and the cost of designing a single generation runs to hundreds of millions of dollars, according to Reuters.

Why It Matters

For IPO investors, the chip programme bears on Anthropic's margins. Its computing commitments, including a planned $36 billion purchase of Google AI chips, are among the largest costs the company faces. If its models can shorten design cycles, Anthropic could argue that its AI gives it an edge in hardware as well as software. For now, though, that claim rests on internal estimates relayed to investors, not on chips in production. Anthropic has not said when its custom chips might be deployed.