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

CryptoWorld News reports that Anthropic is in talks with London startup Fractile to purchase inference chips. The latter’s valuation has already reached $1 billion, and the chips are expected to go into mass production next year. Fractile was founded at the end of 2022, and its core solution is to replace HBM, which is dependent on GPUs, with SRAM in order to reduce inference power consumption and costs. The agreement is still in its early stages, so there is a risk that negotiations could fall apart, but it has already become the core selling point of Fractile’s latest funding. Fractile is seeking more than $100 million in funding, with a valuation of more than $1 billion, and Founders Fund, 8VC, and Accel are all in discussions.

Previously, Fractile raised $15 million, with investors including Kindred Capital and the NATO Innovation Fund. Anthropic has long been diversifying its chip supply, renting cloud servers from Google and Amazon, and has committed to renting NVIDIA servers from Microsoft Azure. NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang said he regrets not investing in Anthropic earlier, believing that might have prevented it from shifting to chips from Google and Amazon.