MatX

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Anthropic reportedly abandons $7B MatX buyout, pursues chip partnership

Paying nearly double a startup's own funding valuation for pre-revenue chip design didn't pencil out, even to cut Nvidia dependency.

• Anthropic held talks to acquire AI chip startup MatX for roughly $7 billion but abandoned the deal, with discussions shifting to a commercial chip-design partnership, Reuters reported.
• MatX was founded in 2023 by former Google TPU engineers Reiner Pope and Mike Gunter to build specialized accelerator chips, like the MatX One, for large language model training and inference.
• The abandoned $7 billion price tag was nearly double the roughly $4 billion valuation MatX is now seeking in a fresh funding round.
• MatX's chip design stores model weights in on-die SRAM rather than adjacent high-bandwidth memory, targeting over 2,000 output tokens per second for large mixture-of-experts models.
• Anthropic is expanding an in-house custom silicon team while keeping a multi-chip strategy, drawing on Nvidia GPUs, Google TPUs and AWS Trainium capacity to run Claude.
• The hardware pivot comes as Anthropic prepares for an expected 2026 IPO chasing a $2 trillion valuation, a target that hinges on projected 2028 revenue of up to $200 billion.
• The reversal shows that even the most cash-rich AI labs are choosing to rent or partner for custom chips rather than own a pre-revenue design team at frontier-lab price tags.