Anthropic is building a team to design its own in-house AI chips as it faces surging demand for its models.
The AI startup is hiring engineers to design custom chips for its Claude AI model, according to a job listing and a company statement.
An Anthropic spokesperson told Business Insider that the company is building an in-house silicon team to design custom chips for Claude, the first time it has publicly confirmed the plans.
They added that Anthropic would co-design hardware and models, allowing Claude to run faster and more efficiently "at the scale our customers need."
The spokesperson said Anthropic has taken and will continue to take a "multi-chip approach" in which hardware from AWS, Google, Nvidia, and AMD will remain central to the AI lab's scaling efforts.
Reuters previously reported that Anthropic was exploring the possibility of designing its own chips, while The Information reported last month that Anthropic had held talks with Samsung Electronics as a potential manufacturing partner.
A recently posted job listing detailed Anthropic's plans for a "custom silicon team," with the company seeking engineers with expertise across a wide range of chip design and verification domains.
The engineer position, which lists a salary range of $320,000 - $485,000, says candidates must be able to demonstrate "direct personal contribution" to the finalization and shipping of semiconductor designs.
"This is a role for someone who has shipped silicon, has a realistic relationship with schedules, and is comfortable making consequential calls without a large organization behind them," the listing read.
Designing an AI chip in-house is a costly and difficult process, but it can help companies to reduce their reliance on Nvidia, which dominates the market for AI accelerator chips.
It also allows AI labs to customize their compute to fit their models' needs.
Anthropic is the latest AI lab to move into designing its own chips. In June, rival OpenAI unveiled its own purpose-built semiconductor, dubbed Jalapeño, which it developed with Broadcom.
Meta is also planning to put its next-generation AI chip into production in September, according to an internal memo reviewed by Reuters, and the CEO of AI startup Mistral has said the French company is considering building its own silicon.
