Anthropic shifts from acquisition to collaboration with MatX

Reuters reported on August 27 that Anthropic, an AI model and services company, had initially considered acquiring MatX, an AI chip firm, for about $7 billion (approximately ¥471.6 billion at current exchange rates). However, negotiations have since shifted toward a collaboration model. MatX is seeking new funding at a valuation of around $4 billion (approximately ¥269.49 billion). MatX claims its MatX One chip outperforms all publicly announced competitors in terms of throughput and latency. It excels in training and inference pre-filling, and shows strong performance in decoding, reinforcement learning workloads, with good latency, compute power, and context length. Anthropic is actively advancing its chip-making project and recently hired Amir Salek, former head of Google's TPU team. The company has been in discussions with several AI chip startups, possibly aiming to produce training or inference chips.