Anthropic Hires Google TPU Founder in Push Toward Custom AI Chips

Anthropic has hired Amir Salek, founder of Google's Tensor Processing Unit program from 2013 to 2022, onto its compute team, where he will report to compute lead James Bradbury, according to Bloomberg. Salek had spent the past four years investing in deep-tech startups at Cerberus Capital Management before the move.
The hire follows Anthropic's addition of Clive Chan, the second engineer hired to OpenAI's custom chip program, two months earlier. Anthropic confirmed on August 5 that it is building an in-house silicon team aiming to co-design chips and Claude models to cut inference costs by roughly half, according to TechCrunch, which also reported early manufacturing talks with Samsung.
Notably, Google remains Anthropic's chip supplier even as it loses key TPU talent to its customer: Anthropic agreed in October to buy up to a million Google TPUs in a deal worth tens of billions of dollars, then expanded the arrangement in April to cover multiple additional gigawatts of TPU capacity through 2027. Anthropic has said AWS Trainium, Google TPUs, and Nvidia ($NVDA) GPUs will remain central to how it scales Claude in the near term.
Anthropic is the last major AI lab to pursue custom silicon — Meta's Iris chip is due in production by September, OpenAI's Jalapeno targets the back half of this year, and Microsoft and Amazon have run custom chips for two years. Anthropic's own chip is not expected before 2028 at the earliest. Broadcom, which already designs custom silicon for OpenAI and Google, is seen as a likely beneficiary if Anthropic's effort advances.