Anthropic has held discussions with Fractile to buy inference chips from the UK-based startup when its hardware becomes available next year, per a report from The Information.
Citing two people with knowledge of the situation, The Information noted that talks between the two companies were in the early stages, and details about the size of the potential agreement hadn’t been shared.
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Spokespeople from Anthropic and Fractile declined requests for comment from the outlet.
The report comes as the generative AI company continues to diversify its compute beyond Nvidia, with existing Google TPU and Amazon Trainium deals.
Those chip deals are similarly being expanded. In April, Anthropic announced it had signed a deal with Broadcom and Google for the supply of 3.5GW-worth of TPUs, slated to come online from 2027.
That same month, Anthropic agreed to lease 5GW of AI capacity from Amazon Web Services (AWS) made up of current and future generations of both AWS’ custom Trainium AI chips and “tens of millions” of Graviton CPUs.
Elsewhere in April, Reuters reported that Anthropic was exploring the possibility of designing its own AI chips.
Fractile was founded in 2022 by Dr. Walter Goodwin, a then PhD student at the University of Oxford’s Robotics Institute. The company is developing chips that use in-memory compute, an approach that allows processors to run calculations directly in computer memory.
Speaking to DCD in 2024, Goodwin said that by taking this approach, Fractile hopes to create hardware that reduces power consumption and improves performance, all while allowing for faster and less expensive inference at scale.
In February 2026, the startup announced plans to invest £100 million ($132m) to bolster its UK operations over the next three years, with the expansion set to include the growth of its existing sites in London and Bristol, and the creation of a new hardware engineering facility in the latter city.
The following month, it was reported that Fractile was looking to raise $200 million at a $1 billion valuation.
Read the orginal article: https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/anthropic-in-discussions-to-by-inference-chips-from-uk-startup-fractile-report/
