The man who shipped Google's first seven generations of TPU has gone to Anthropic
Anthropic has hired Amir Salek, a founder of Google's custom-chip programme who ran its tensor processing unit business until 2022 and delivered the first seven generations of those chips, Bloomberg reported on 21 August. He joins the compute team reporting to James Bradbury, and comes from Cerberus Capital Management. Anthropic began advertising for an AI chip design team at the start of August; this is the senior hire that turns a set of job listings into a programme. The company already rents enormous quantities of Google TPUs, has been in talks over the British startup Fractile's inference chips, and is among the largest indirect consumers of Nvidia hardware in the world.
Why it mattersDesigning your own accelerator is a multi-year, multi-billion-dollar commitment that only makes sense if you expect to run enormous inference volumes for a long time and want the cost of doing so out of someone else's hands. Anthropic making that commitment while preparing a public listing tells you how much of its future cost base it thinks is silicon. Salek is not a symbolic hire; he is the specific person who has already done this once, at scale, at Google.
▶ Related video: How Anthropic, OpenAI and Google Are Designing Their Own AI Chips
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