Anthropic Negotiates Acquisition of UK Startup Fractile's Inference Chips, Valued at $1 Billion

According to Beating monitoring, Anthropic is in negotiations with London-based startup Fractile to procure its inference chips, which are expected to begin mass production for data centers as early as next year. Founded in late 2022, Fractile’s core solution replaces GPU-dependent HBM (High Bandwidth Memory) with SRAM (Static Random Access Memory), reducing the back-and-forth movement of data between the chip and external storage, thereby lowering inference power consumption and costs. Similar approaches are being taken by Cerebras and Groq. The agreement is still in its early stages, with the scale unknown and the possibility of talks breaking down. However, this potential order has become a key selling point in Fractile’s latest funding round. Fractile is seeking over $100 million in financing at a valuation exceeding $1 billion, with Founders Fund, 8VC, and Accel in discussions. Previously, Fractile had only raised $15 million, with investors including Kindred Capital, NATO Innovation Fund, and Oxford Science Enterprises. Anthropic has been deliberately diversifying its chip supply. The company has rented cloud servers from Google and Amazon, and last fall committed $30 billion to rent NVIDIA servers from Microsoft Azure (with NVIDIA investing $10 billion and Microsoft $5 billion as part of the deal). Recently, Anthropic also agreed to procure Google’s self-developed chips for use outside of Google Cloud. Reuters previously reported that Anthropic is also considering designing its own inference chips, similar to strategies employed by OpenAI and Meta. Inference costs are currently a pain point for Anthropic. Last year, the company’s inference business gross margin fell below internal expectations, and the recent surge in demand for Claude Code has led to a shortage of computing power, with some users experiencing throttling during peak times, prompting public protests from developers. NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang recently expressed regret for not investing in Anthropic sooner, believing that it might have prevented the company from heavily turning to Google and Amazon’s chips.