Anthropic is in talks to acquire the UK-based chip startup Fractile, which develops inference chips, with the latter being valued at over $1 billion.

According to Beating monitoring, Anthropic is in talks with London startup Fractile to procure its reasoning chips. The chips are expected to enter mass production as early as next year for data centers. Founded at the end of 2022, Fractile’s core approach is to replace GPU-dependent HBM (high-bandwidth memory) with SRAM (static random-access memory), reducing the back-and-forth movement of data between the chip and external storage, thereby lowering inference power consumption and cost. Cerebras and Groq also follow a similar route.

The talks are still at an early stage; the scale is unknown, and there is a possibility that negotiations could fall apart. But this potential order has already become a key selling point in Fractile’s latest funding round. Fractile is seeking more than $100 million in funding at a valuation of more than $1 billion, with Founders Fund, 8VC, and Accel all in discussions. Previously, Fractile had only raised $15 million, with investors including Kindred Capital, the NATO Innovation Fund, and Oxford Science Enterprises.

Anthropic has deliberately diversified its chip supply. The company has leased cloud servers from Google and Amazon. Last autumn, it made a $30 billion commitment to lease NVIDIA servers from Microsoft Azure (NVIDIA contributing $10 billion, and Microsoft investing $5 billion as equity in exchange). More recently, Anthropic also agreed to buy Google’s in-house chips for use outside Google Cloud. Reuters previously reported that Anthropic is also considering designing its own inference chips, similar to the strategies of OpenAI and Meta.

Inference costs are Anthropic’s current pain point. Last year, the company’s inference business gross margin was lower than internal expectations. A recent surge in demand for Claude Code has also led to a shortage of compute capacity. Some users have been rate-limited during peak hours, prompting developers to publicly protest. NVIDIA CEO Huang Renxun recently said he regrets not investing in Anthropic earlier, believing that it might have prevented the company from making a large shift toward chips from Google and Amazon.