Anthropic discussed acquiring AI chip startup MatX for roughly $7 billion before the deal fell through, with conversations now evolving into a potential partnership, according to a Reuters exclusive report citing people briefed on the matter1,4,5.
The acquisition would have given Anthropic in-house chip design expertise from MatX, which was founded in 2023 by former Google tensor processing unit engineers Reiner Pope and Mike Gunter2. Reuters reported on the discussions for the first time on August 27 but could not determine why the talks are no longer active.
MatX is now seeking to raise new capital at a valuation of about $4 billion, according to one of the people, who requested anonymity to discuss private matters6. MatX completed a $500 million Series B funding round in February of this year.
Anthropic declined to comment on deal talks with MatX, and MatX did not respond to a request for comment.
The abandoned acquisition reflects Anthropic's broader push to build custom silicon for its Claude family of AI models. Anthropic said it is expanding an in-house silicon team to design custom chips that will allow Claude models to run faster and more efficiently. The company has hired engineering and executive talent to accelerate the chip design process. On August 22, Anthropic hired Google chip veteran Amir Salek as part of its push into hardware. In June, Anthropic hired former OpenAI chip engineer Clive Chan.
Anthropic has also held meetings with a range of AI chip startups in recent weeks but has not yet elected to make an acquisition.
The hardware ambitions sit alongside massive compute spending commitments. Anthropic plans to buy $36 billion worth of Google's AI chips. The company signed a $45 billion deal to rent AI cloud computing power from Nscale. Anthropic also agreed to pay SpaceX $1.25 billion per month through May 2029 for computing capacity across its data center clusters. Anthropic has a deal with SpaceX to use its Colossus 1 facility, which houses more than 220,000 Nvidia Corp. chips.
Anthropic still plans to maintain a multi-chip strategy, working with providers from Nvidia Corp. to Google. Anthropic was one of the first companies to run its models on hardware from several vendors including Nvidia Corp., Google, and Amazon.
The move parallels efforts by other frontier labs to reduce dependence on third-party chip suppliers. OpenAI recently said its first custom chip, called Jalapeno, outperformed a similar processor made by Nvidia Corp. and was more energy efficient in performing inference calculations. Nvidia Corp. said in a conference call on Wednesday that its processors would be in short supply through 2027.
ANALYSIS The gap between the reported $7 billion acquisition price and MatX's current $4 billion fundraising valuation suggests Anthropic was willing to pay a substantial premium for immediate access to chip design talent and intellectual property. The pivot from acquisition to partnership, combined with ongoing meetings with other chip startups, indicates Anthropic is pursuing multiple paths to custom silicon simultaneously.
Anthropic is expected to list in 2026.