Anthropic discussed acquiring AI chip startup MatX for roughly $7 billion, but the merger talks later evolved into a potential partnership and are no longer active, with the reason unclear. MatX, founded by former Google Tensor Processing Unit engineers, is seeking new funding at a valuation of about $4 billion. Anthropic has met with several chip startups and hired Google chip veteran Amir Salek and former OpenAI chip engineer Clive Chan as it develops a custom-hardware strategy. The discussions indicate possible interest in training chips as well as inference processors, while OpenAI is pursuing its own Jalapeno chip and has said it outperformed a comparable Nvidia processor on inference efficiency. Anthropic has not chosen an acquisition and is also pursuing compute partnerships, including with AMD, while Amazon has provided $8 billion in funding. The existing record previously described the MatX talks as an abandoned acquisition and reported a $500 million Series B and a 2027 shipping target for MatX One; those details are not included in the latest Reuters account, which instead reports MatX’s current fundraising effort and approximate valuation.