Anthropic has hired former Google TPU leader Amir Salek as the artificial intelligence company works towards its own in-house semiconductor business.

Salek will report to Head of Compute James Bradbury and will support the development and advancement of compute infrastructure, Bloomberg reported.

Prior to joining Anthropic, Salek was working as a senior managing director at Cerberus Capital Management. He also worked as a senior director of engineering at Google, where he delivered the first seven generations of TPU solutions to Google Data Centers, according to his LinkedIn profile.

He also held a previous role at Nvidia, where he founded and scaled its System-on-a-chip (SoC) organization and was a chip lead at PMC-Sierra.

Anthropic is building out its internal chip-design team to develop custom processors for its Claude artificial intelligence models. The company has started hiring engineers with expertise across both hardware and software.

The effort expands Anthropic’s existing multi-chip strategy, with the company signaling that it will continue to use a mix of third-party infrastructure and accelerators. Its current ecosystem includes hardware and cloud partnerships tied to Amazon Web Services, Google, Nvidia and AMD.

Leading AI companies are actively working to reduce their dependence on scarce Nvidia GPUs. The availability of advanced chips has become a bottleneck for training and running frontier AI models, with companies competing for limited accelerator capacity.

Anthropic has deep ties with Amazon, which has invested billions of dollars in the startup and provides access to its Trainium and Inferentia chips through Amazon Web Services. In April, Amazon announced that Anthropic would spend more than $100 billion over the next 10 years on AWS Technologies.

Developing a cutting-edge AI chip can cost roughly $500 million, reflecting the expense of recruiting specialized engineers, designing advanced architectures and ensuring chips can be manufactured at scale without costly production failures.

Anthropic has also bought $250 million worth of chips from the U.K.-based chip company Fractile and plans to expand the current contract. Anthropic has also signed capacity deals with Riot Platforms and Volta Infra Holdings Ltd. as it continues to beef up its chip and data center capacity, Bloomberg noted.

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