Anthropic is reportedly in discussions to source inference chips from Fractile, a London-based startup developing hardware purpose-built for running AI models more efficiently. The Information first reported the talks on Saturday. The move marks the latest step by the fast-growing AI lab to diversify its chip supply, as demand for its Claude assistant continues to put pressure on existing server capacity.
An Insatiable Appetite for Compute
The chip discussions come during an extraordinary stretch of growth for Anthropic. In early April, the company disclosed that its annualized revenue run rate had crossed $30 billion, up from roughly $9 billion at the end of 2025. TechCrunch has since reported the figure may already be closer to $40 billion. For context, OpenAI confirmed roughly $2 billion in monthly revenue—about a $24 billion annual rate—meaning Anthropic now leads its main rival on top-line revenue, despite a much smaller consumer user base.
That trajectory has dramatically increased Anthropic’s compute requirements. In early April, the company announced a long-term partnership with Google and Broadcom for multiple gigawatts of next-generation tensor processing unit capacity, expected to come online starting in 2027. Reuters also reported in April that Anthropic is exploring custom chip designs of its own, though that effort is reportedly still in its early stages, with no dedicated team yet in place.
Why Fractile?
Fractile, founded in 2022, came out of stealth with $15 million in seed funding and a chip architecture that breaks sharply from Nvidia’s GPU template. Rather than shuttling data back and forth between memory and processing units, Fractile’s design places the data needed for computation right next to the transistors doing the math, aiming to dramatically reduce the memory bottleneck that constrains today’s AI hardware. The company has claimed that simulations show its design could run large language models up to 100 times faster than current GPUs and at roughly one-tenth the cost.
In February, the UK government announced that Fractile would invest £100 million over three years to expand its operations, including a new hardware engineering center in Bristol. By late March, the Financial Times reported the startup was in talks to raise more than $200 million at a $1 billion valuation, with Accel and the NATO Innovation Fund named among prospective backers.
A Push to Diversify Beyond Nvidia
No purchase price, contract terms, or timeline have been disclosed for a possible Anthropic-Fractile deal. Fractile’s chips are not yet in production and are slated to launch in 2027. Even so, the discussions reflect a broader pattern among leading AI players—including Amazon, Meta, and OpenAI—pursuing alternatives to Nvidia’s dominant GPUs through custom or specialized silicon. Anthropic is also reportedly working on a potential $50 billion fundraise at a valuation targeting $900 billion, which would put it past OpenAI’s $852 billion valuation from earlier this year.
