Anthropic in Talks to Buy AI Chips From U.K. Startup
The Takeaway
- Anthropic in talks to buy AI inference chips from UK startup Fractile.
- Anthropic seeks to diversify chip supply and reduce high operational costs.
- Fractile’s potential deal helped as it spoke with investors about raising $100 million.
As Anthropic’s sales explode, straining the servers it uses, the company is considering adding another source of AI server chips in addition to existing suppliers Google, Amazon and Nvidia.
The maker of Claude has recently been in talks with London-based startup Fractile to buy its inference chips, which aim to run AI models efficiently, when the chips become available next year, according to two people who have spoken to Fractile leaders. Deals such as these would give Anthropic more leverage with suppliers just at the time when its spending on servers and chips is projected to reach tens of billions of dollars a year.
Anthropic has long differentiated itself from other AI developers by renting a variety of server chips to develop and run its technology so it isn’t dependent on Nvidia’s hardware the way OpenAI and xAI are. Anthropic also recently agreed to purchase a substantial number of chips made by Google, which Anthropic would use outside Google Cloud data centers, giving it more control over how the hardware works.
The three-year-old Fractile is one of numerous startups aiming to create server chips that run completed AI models more efficiently than Nvidia graphics processing units do. These inference chips rely on static random-access memory, which minimizes the need to shuttle data back and forth to separate high-bandwidth memory chips as GPUs do. Other users of SRAM include Cerebras and startup Groq, which last year licensed technology to Nvidia, which also hired its leaders.
AI firms and cloud providers have been desperately trying to create alternatives to Nvidia chips for inference as a way to reduce costs and improve margins. Last year, Anthropic’s gross profit margins from running its AI products were lower than it had projected due to higher-than-expected inference costs, an issue OpenAI also experienced. Since then, both companies have focused on ways to lower costs, including by inking new agreements with non-Nvidia AI chip suppliers.
Fractile’s potential agreement with Anthropic was a big selling point for investors looking at the smaller startup’s most recent funding round, which aimed to raise over $100 million at a $1 billion–plus valuation, according to another person with knowledge of the round. Founders Fund, 8VC and Accel have been in talks to invest in the round, the person said.
The size of the potential agreement with Anthropic couldn’t be learned. Talks are in the early stages and the customer agreement could fall through. Spokespeople from Anthropic and Fractile declined to comment. Spokespeople from Founders Fund, 8VC and Accel didn’t respond to a request for comment.
The deal is won’t help with Anthropic’s near-term compute needs, since Fractile’s chips won’t be available to go into data centers until next year at the earliest, Fractile leaders have previously said.
Instead, Anthropic has been inking large cloud deals with Amazon and Google as it raced to keep its systems running while its revenue pace tripled since the end of last year. In April, Anthropic unveiled new agreements to secure hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of servers from those cloud providers, including using the custom chips they develop, though much of it won’t come online anytime soon.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang recently said he regretted not investing earlier in Anthropic, as it might have prevented it from becoming a major customer of Google and Amazon chips. Last fall, Anthropic committed to spending $30 billion to rent Nvidia servers from Microsoft’s Azure cloud in exchange for Nvidia investing $10 billion and Microsoft investing $5 billion in the startup.
Anthropic has also considered designing its own inference chips, according to Reuters, a strategy OpenAI and Meta Platforms are also pursuing to lessen their reliance on Nvidia.
Anthropic is moving quickly to line up access to AI chips after surging demand for its AI coding and work agents caused a compute crunch. Last month, developers protested its decision to limit some Claude Code customers’ ability to use the product during peak hours. Some customers have complained of outages.
Fractile was co-founded in late 2022 by Walter Goodwin, an Oxford University AI and robotics doctorate holder who previously worked on robotics at Amazon, and Yuhang Song, who left Fractile in 2024 to found another startup. The company previously raised $15 million in funding from investors including Kindred Capital, the Nato Innovation Fund and Oxford Science Enterprises.