Anthropic to build in-house chip design team for Claude, hire engineers

Aug 5 (Reuters) - Anthropic said on Wednesday it is building an in-house team to design custom chips for its Claude AI models, confirming an earlier Reuters report, as the startup responds to a shortage of chips needed to power and develop more advanced AI systems.

The company said it was hiring engineers with experience across the hardware and software stack to help co-design custom chips and AI models that can make Claude run faster and more efficiently at the scale required by customers.

Reuters reported in April that Anthropic was mulling designing its own AI chips.

The startup said custom silicon was the latest step in its multi-chip strategy and that it would continue to rely on a diversified hardware stack that includes technology from Amazon Web Services, Google, Nvidia and AMD.

Anthropic did not provide a timeline for its chip plans or say whether it intends to manufacture them itself.

Designing an advanced AI chip can cost roughly half a billion dollars, according to industry sources, ⁠as ​companies need to employ skilled engineers and ​spend to make sure the manufacturing process has no defects.

(Reporting by Prathik Jayaprakash in Bengaluru; Editing by Jonathan Ananda)