By his own account, Amir Salek created Google's ability to design its own data-center chips and put the first Tensor Processing Unit, the processor Google built to run its AI, into production. He ran that business until 2022, and Anthropic, announcing the hire on Friday, credited him with delivering the chip's first seven generations, according to Bloomberg.
Salek joins what Anthropic calls its compute team, and a chip program that is still mostly a plan. The company has confirmed it is forming a group to design chips and its AI models together, and its job listings describe a small effort recruiting for everything from design through the testing and production of a first chip. No chip, timeline or manufacturer has been announced.
The road Anthropic is starting down is the one Salek already traveled. Designing processors around its own AI gave Google control over what its computing cost, what it could do and how reliably it ran, and, in our read, that control is what Anthropic wants for Claude, even as it keeps buying enormous amounts of computing capacity from outside suppliers. Salek has made that bet pay off once. Anthropic just hired him to make it pay off again.