Anthropic reportedly had planned to acquire AI chip startup MatX for about $7 billion

PANews reported on August 28, citing Reuters, sources revealed that Anthropic had discussed acquiring AI chip startup MatX for about $7 billion to accelerate the research and development of custom hardware for its rapidly growing AI business. A person familiar with the matter said the acquisition talks later evolved into discussions about a partnership. Previously, according to one of the people, MatX is currently seeking a new round of financing at a valuation of about $4 billion. The discussions with MatX also indicate that Anthropic may be interested in developing chips for model training, while other chip startups and rival OpenAI are working on processors better suited to generating chatbot responses, a process known as "inference." However, the people said Anthropic may also choose to develop inference chips.