Anthropic got far enough into a plan to buy the AI chip startup MatX to have a number attached to it, roughly $7bn, before the deal stopped moving. Reuters reported the talks on Thursday, citing people familiar with them, and said the discussions have since evolved into a conversation about a partnership rather than an acquisition.
Why the purchase was abandoned is the part nobody has explained. Reuters said it could not determine what ended the active negotiations, and the reporting rests on unnamed sources rather than any filing or announcement.
Anthropic declined to comment to Reuters on the talks, and MatX did not respond to Reuters’ request for comment. TNW has not independently verified the report.
MatX is a small company with an unusually specific pedigree. It was founded in 2023 by Reiner Pope, who led AI software work for Google’s tensor processing units, and Mike Gunter, a lead designer on the TPU hardware, and it builds processors aimed squarely at large language model training rather than at general-purpose computing.
The startup raised a $500m Series B in February, led by Jane Street and Leopold Aschenbrenner’s Situational Awareness fund, with Marvell, Spark Capital and the Collison brothers also on the cap table. Its pitch is that a chip designed for one workload can beat Nvidia’s GPUs by a wide margin on that workload, with volume shipments planned from 2027.
