Anthropic Hires Google Chip Veteran Amid Hardware Push

Anthropic PBC has made a significant move in its push into hardware by hiring Amir Salek, a veteran of Google's custom chip program. Salek will join Anthropic's compute team and report directly to James Bradbury. He previously ran Google's tensor processing unit business until 2022 and delivered the first seven generations of those chips.

Anthropic wants to build an in-house silicon business and has started hiring for this effort. The company currently buys chips from various sources, including Nvidia Corp, Google, and Amazon.com. It has also recently signed chip and data center capacity deals with companies like Fractile, Riot Platforms, and Volta Infra Holdings.

The move is part of Anthropic's strategy to cope with supply shortages and tailor designs to better meet its needs. This push into hardware is similar to that of rival OpenAI, which has unveiled a chip called Jalapeno co-developed with Broadcom.