Anthropic Signs Preliminary $250M AI Chip Deal with Fractile
AI chip startup Fractile has reached a preliminary $250 million supply agreement with Anthropic to deliver its analog in-memory computing ASIC inference accelerators starting in 2027. Concurrently, Fractile is seeking a new funding round targeting a valuation of up to $6.5 billion. This deal highlights Anthropic's strategy to diversify its AI hardware supply chain away from Nvidia's dominance by investing in novel chip architectures. If successful, Fractile's technology could significantly lower the cost and increase the speed of running large AI models. Fractile claims its analog in-memory computing chips can run leading AI models at 25 times the speed and one-tenth the cost of traditional hardware. The startup previously raised $220 million in May 2026 at a $1 billion valuation, representing a massive valuation jump in its latest funding pursuit.
## BACKGROUND
Traditional computing architectures suffer from the 'memory wall,' where moving data between the processor and memory limits performance and wastes energy. Analog in-memory computing addresses this by performing calculations directly within the memory cells using analog signals, which is highly efficient for the matrix multiplication tasks central to AI inference. An ASIC (Application-Specific Integrated Circuit) is a chip customized for a specific use case, in this case, optimized specifically for running AI models (inference) rather than training them.