Anthropic hires Google chip veteran Amir Salek as part of push into hardware

Anthropic PBC has hired Amir Salek, a founder of the custom chip program at Alphabet Inc's Google, as the AI lab lays the groundwork for a push into making its own semiconductors.

Salek is joining the compute team of Anthropic, maker of the Claude platform, the AI company said Friday. The executive ran Google's tensor processing unit business until 2022 and delivered the first seven generations of those chips. In the new role, Salek will report to James Bradbury.

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Anthropic, which buys chips from a variety of sources, including Nvidia Corp, Google and Amazon.com, has indicated recently that it wants to build an in-house silicon business. The San Francisco-based company has begun hiring and listing jobs for the effort.

Like other AI giants, Anthropic is scrambling to get enough data center infrastructure to support its ambitions. Custom chips would potentially help it cope with supply shortages and tailor designs to better meet its needs.

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Rival OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, is taking similar steps. It has unveiled a chip called Jalapeno, co-developed with Broadcom, and plans to begin using it later this year.

Anthropic is signing chip and data center capacity deals at a rapid clip - working with both established and emerging vendors. The company has an agreement with UK-based chip startup Fractile for an initial order of roughly $250 million of its chips, with the intention to expand that contract in the future, Bloomberg News has reported.

The AI lab also recently signed capacity deals with Riot Platforms and Volta Infra Holdings. After leaving Google, Salek has been senior managing director at Cerberus Capital Management, a private equity firm co-founded by Deputy Secretary of Defense Stephen Feinberg. He also previously worked at Nvidia, the leading maker of AI processors.