Anthropic Hires Former Google Chip Leader Amid AI Capacity Crunch

Anthropic has hired Amir Salek, a former Google TPU leader, to support the development of its in-house semiconductor business. Salek will report to Head of Compute James Bradbury and focus on advancing compute infrastructure. He previously worked as a senior managing director at Cerberus Capital Management and held various roles at Nvidia.

Anthropic is expanding its internal chip-design team to develop custom processors for its Claude AI models, which are used across a mix of third-party infrastructure and accelerators. The company has already started hiring engineers with expertise in both hardware and software, as well as partnerships with Amazon Web Services, Google, Nvidia, and AMD.

The effort aims to reduce Anthropic's dependence on scarce Nvidia GPUs and address the bottleneck of limited accelerator capacity for training and running frontier AI models. Anthropic has invested heavily in its relationship with Amazon, which provides access to Trainium and Inferentia chips through AWS and has a $100 billion investment commitment over the next decade.