Anthropic discussed buying AI chip startup MatX for roughly $7 billion, but the talks are no longer active. MatX is now seeking to raise new capital at a roughly $4 billion valuation, according to sources cited in the report.
MatX CEO Reiner Pope discusses the company’s LLM-chip strategy, including its hybrid SRAM-HBM memory architecture and why frontier labs are its natural first customers. He also addresses CUDA lock-in and doubts that a roughly 100-person startup can manufacture at datacenter scale; MatX has raised about $600 million to date.
MatX raises a $500 million Series B led by Jane Street and Situational Awareness. The startup, founded by former Google hardware engineers Reiner Pope and Mike Gunter, aims to build processors that are 10 times better than Nvidia GPUs at training large language models and delivering results. The funding will support chip production with TSMC, with shipments planned for 2027.
