Anthropic is in talks to buy inference chips from Fractile, a London startup now reportedly worth close to $1 billion. The chips could be in production and shipping to data centers as early as next year.
Founded in late 2022, Fractile's big idea is to swap out the HBM (high-bandwidth memory) that GPUs depend on for SRAM (static random-access memory), drastically cutting the amount of data shuttling between chip and external storage. That means lower power draw and lower cost for AI inference. Cerebras and Groq are working along similar lines.
The agreement is still in its early stages, with no word on scale — and there's always a chance the whole thing falls through. But the potential deal has already become a key pillar of Fractile's growing valuation.