Anthropic will design its own hardware to power Claude

Anthropic and OpenAI are racing to scale up while reducing dependence on Nvidia.

Custom silicon team

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.

(You can see listings for a silicon engineer and a technical program manager, silicon on Anthropic’s job board right now.)

A spokesperson for Anthropic then confirmed the plans to both Business Insider and TechCrunch. 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.

Other companies building custom chips

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.