Anthropic hires Google TPU founder Amir Salek for custom silicon, reporting to Bradbury
On Aug 22 Anthropic announced hiring Google custom-chip program co-founder Amir Salek to its compute team, reporting to James Bradbury. Salek led the first seven TPU generations at Google from 2013-2022 and previously founded Nvidia SoC business.
On August 22, Anthropic PBC announced it has hired former Google custom-chip program founder Amir Salek to its compute team, where he will report to compute lead James Bradbury. The personnel move was publicly disclosed by Anthropic on Friday and marks the latest public signal that the Claude platform developer is stepping up its push into proprietary semiconductors.
Publicly available background shows that Salek served as the founding head of Google's Tensor Processing Unit business from 2013 through 2022, leading the first seven generations of TPU chips from inception through volume production. Before joining Google, Salek spent eight years at Nvidia, where he founded and led the company's system-on-chip business and oversaw more than 25 GPU and Tegra chip programs. After leaving Google in 2022 he served as a senior managing director at Cerberus Capital Management.
Anthropic currently sources chips from Nvidia, Google and Amazon, but supply-shortage risk and compute-cost pressure have accelerated the case for in-house silicon. Earlier this month the company posted job listings on its website for an internal custom-silicon team. Bloomberg previously reported that Anthropic has placed an initial roughly $250 million chip order with UK startup Fractile and signed data-center capacity agreements with Riot Platforms and Volta Infra Holdings.
Competitor OpenAI is moving along a parallel path. It has already announced Jalapeño, a chip co-developed with Broadcom, and plans to begin using it later this year. Anthropic has also been reported to be in discussions with Samsung Electronics on 2-nanometer process and advanced packaging services. Anthropic declined to comment on its silicon roadmap timeline, saying only that the work is progressing.