Anthropic will design its own hardware to power Claude

What happened

Anthropic is hiring a “custom silicon team” to design chips on which to run its models, the company has revealed. Yesterday, Business Insider noticed a job listing for a senior engineer with experience shipping semiconductor designs. ) A spokesperson for Anthropic then confirmed the plans to both Business Insider and TechCrunch.

First, much of the industry is heavily reliant on Nvidia for the hardware the companies’ models run on, and Nvidia’s continued leverage there is a potential strategic vulnerability, especially as AI companies operate in an environment where compute infrastructure is highly competitive as demand continues to outstrip current capacity. Second, designing chips for specific models and vice versa could lead to better performance.

So, for example, if OpenAI can reap the rewards of that vertical integration, you can bet Anthropic and other frontier model providers will want that advantage as well. To that point, Anthropic says its teams will co-design new hardware and models side by side. It has co-designed certain hardware with partners before, but the plan is now to bring more silicon expertise inside Anthropic itself.

Why it matters

The spokesperson clarified that Anthropic will still take a “multi-chip approach,” with plans to use hardware from other companies alongside its own designs as it continues to scale up. This is confirmation of a rumor that has been circulating for a little bit; The Information previously reported that Anthropic was considering working with Samsung as a hardware manufacturing partner. Anthropic is not alone in walking this path.

Its competitor, OpenAI, recently announced a new custom chip called Jalapeño designed for large language model inference in data centers. OpenAI partnered with Broadcom to develop the chip. Google has been running its models on its own hardware for a while; Meta has also designed and deployed its own chips, and Mistral is reportedly looking into doing the same. There are a few reasons AI providers are doing this.

What to watch

Anthropic may also hope this could help its frontier models get some extra competitive edge as software developers and other users begin exploring running cheaper, smaller, or open-weight models on their own hardware or on edge devices. However, since Anthropic is still in the process of hiring key team members, it will be some time before either the company or its users see any benefits.