Anthropic Begins Work on Custom AI Chips to Rival OpenAI

Anthropic has begun developing its own proprietary AI chips to reduce reliance on external chip designers and lower compute infrastructure costs. The company aims to complete its chip program in half the time it took OpenAI to produce its first-generation hardware. Moving chip design in-house could reduce the cost of building a gigawatt of compute to $20 billion from $60 billion, according to Dylan Patel of SemiAnalysis. The move follows tests on the open-source InferenceX benchmark that showed OpenAI's first-generation chip outperformed Nvidia's Blackwell when running Chinese models.