Date: August 21, 2026 Main source: Bloomberg, via ETEnterpriseAI Link: https://enterpriseai.economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/industry/anthropic-hires-google-chip-veteran-amir-salek-as-part-of-push-into-hardware/133435386
Summary
Anthropic hired Amir Salek, one of the founders of Google's custom chip program and the person responsible for the first seven generations of TPUs. Salek joins Anthropic's compute team as the company starts building in-house semiconductor capacity. Anthropic currently uses a mix of hardware from Nvidia, Google and Amazon. The hire signals that the company wants more control over the hardware that runs and trains Claude.
Why it matters
Frontier labs are finding that depending entirely on outside providers limits costs, capacity and speed of innovation. Google already owns TPUs, Amazon develops Trainium, OpenAI is working on its own chips and now Anthropic is moving the same way. The integration between models and silicon can become one of the main competitive advantages of the next stage of AI.
Practical implications
- Do not assume Nvidia will keep the same dominant position in inference indefinitely.
- Design infrastructure with abstraction layers that let you switch between GPUs, TPUs and specialized accelerators.
- If you sell enterprise solutions, ask about residency, cost and latency requirements before choosing the model provider.