Anthropic Held, Then Abandoned, a $7 Billion Bid for AI Chip Startup MatX, Reuters Reports
Anthropic discussed buying AI chip startup MatX for roughly $7 billion, then walked away; the two sides are now said to be exploring a supply partnership instead.
Overview
Anthropic discussed acquiring AI chip startup MatX for roughly $7 billion before the talks stalled, and the two companies are now said to be exploring a supply partnership instead of a purchase, according to The Next Web, which cites Reuters’ original reporting. Outlook Business independently confirms the same figures and the shift from acquisition talks toward a partnership.
What We Know
Anthropic “got far enough into a plan to buy the AI chip startup MatX to have a number attached to it, roughly $7bn, before the deal stopped moving,” as reported by The Next Web. Neither company has explained why the acquisition talks ended: the report “could not determine what ended the active negotiations,” and Anthropic declined to comment while MatX did not respond to a request for comment, according to the same report. Outlook Business similarly notes that “the reason the acquisition discussions are no longer active could not be determined.”
MatX is a small, specialized outfit. It was founded in 2023 by Reiner Pope, who previously led AI software work for Google’s tensor processing units, and Mike Gunter, a lead designer on the TPU hardware, according to The Next Web. The company builds processors aimed at large language model training rather than general-purpose computing, with volume shipments planned from 2027, and its Series B investors bet its workload-specific chips could outperform Nvidia’s GPUs by a wide margin on that workload. MatX raised a $500 million Series B in February, led by Jane Street and Leopold Aschenbrenner’s Situational Awareness fund, with TechCrunch reporting that Marvell Technology, NFDG, Spark Capital, and Stripe co-founders Patrick and John Collison also joined the round. TechCrunch reports Reiner Pope serves as founder and CEO, and that MatX plans to manufacture with TSMC.
The valuation gap is notable: MatX is now raising fresh capital at about $4 billion, meaning the discussed $7 billion purchase price sat roughly three-quarters above the price private investors are currently being asked to pay, according to The Next Web.
The episode fits into a broader hardware push at Anthropic. The company confirmed an in-house chip team earlier this year and is separately in talks with Samsung about manufacturing a custom part, The Next Web reports. Outlook Business reports Anthropic has said it is expanding that in-house silicon team to develop custom processors while continuing to use chips from multiple suppliers, including Nvidia and Google, and that it has held meetings with several AI chip startups in recent weeks without deciding to acquire any of them. Anthropic recently hired Google chip veteran Amir Salek, and in June it hired former OpenAI chip engineer Clive Chan, who worked on OpenAI’s Jalapeño processor, according to Outlook Business.
The hardware ambitions sit alongside heavy compute spending. Outlook Business reports Anthropic plans to buy $36 billion worth of Google AI chips and has agreed to a $45 billion deal with Nscale for AI cloud computing capacity, on top of a commitment to pay SpaceX $1.25 billion per month through May 2029 for computing capacity across its data center clusters. The Next Web adds that Broadcom has been seeking more than $60 billion in debt to fund chips destined for Anthropic, and that AMD has put $5 billion into the company alongside a two-gigawatt deployment commitment — separate from Anthropic’s earlier chip supply deal with Fractile and its commitment to Google’s eighth-generation TPUs.
The wider market for workload-specific AI chips has grown quickly this year: rival startup Etched raised $500 million at a $5 billion valuation, and a cluster of accelerator startups took in about $1.6 billion across five rounds in 2026, according to The Next Web.
What We Don’t Know
Why the active acquisition negotiations ended is not known — both companies declined to explain, and no filing or announcement has addressed it. Whether a formal partnership between Anthropic and MatX will actually be signed is also unclear; as of the latest reporting, “there is no indication that a partnership has been signed,” per The Next Web. Terms of any prospective supply arrangement, and what it would mean for MatX’s ability to sell to other customers, have not been disclosed.
Analysis
A supply partnership rather than a purchase is not obviously a step back for either side. An acquisition would have handed Anthropic a design team to integrate at the same time it is racing to get chips into data centers, while a supply agreement can deliver silicon without absorbing MatX’s organization — and leaves MatX free to sell to other customers, which matters for a Series B investor base that presumably did not back the company to become a single customer’s internal unit, as The Next Web notes. The reported $7 billion figure, even without a signed deal behind it, sets an informal price marker for the next negotiation among AI labs shopping for custom-silicon teams — a market that already includes Anthropic’s Fractile deal and Google TPU commitment, and, on the inference side, OpenAI’s own Jalapeño chip effort.