Anthropic is reportedly in discussions to procure high-performance Artificial Intelligence chips from Fractile, a London-based start-up. The potential agreement is aimed at diversifying the Claude creator’s hardware supply chain away from Nvidia and securing chips for custom inference. Anthropic is exploring the partnership to reduce the significant overheads associated with current semiconductor solutions while improving the speed and efficiency of its current and next-generation models.
According to reports, the talks are part of a broader effort by the San Francisco-based company to cut its dependency on Nvidia. Anthropic currently relies heavily on Nvidia’s H100 units alongside custom processors provided by Amazon and Google, both of which have made multi-billion-dollar investments in the company. High prices and limited availability for these standard chips have squeezed profit margins across the sector, pushing major developers to seek alternative infrastructure. Industry analysts say a deal with a specialised supplier like Fractile could give Anthropic greater control over its technical stack, reflecting a wider shift by companies such as Microsoft and Meta toward internal or boutique chip designs.
Founded in 2022 by Oxford PhD Walter Goodwin, Fractile has attracted attention for a chip design built around “memory-compute fusion.” Instead of constantly moving data between the processor and separate memory modules, the architecture keeps data directly on the chip using static random-access memory, or SRAM, which does not need to be refreshed. According to the British start-up, this method can run large language models up to a hundred times faster than existing hardware while lowering operational costs by 90%.
Fractile’s technology remains in development, and the company has not yet launched a commercial product. Its specialised chips are not expected to be ready for full-scale data centre deployment until 2027. Even so, Fractile is reportedly in negotiations to raise ? million (€170.5m) in funding at a valuation exceeding ? billion (€853m). If a formal agreement is reached, Fractile could become Anthropic’s fourth major chip supplier, alongside Nvidia, Google and Amazon. The discussions are still at an early stage, and no binding contract has been signed.
