Key facts
- Volta Infra, an AI infrastructure startup, is valued at $2.4 billion.
- Volta secured a $10 billion, six-year cloud computing contract with Anthropic.
- The deal includes 133 megawatts of capacity at a Bitdeer data center in Norway.
- Volta raised $300 million in seed and Series A financing.
- Anthropic is building an in-house team to design custom chips for its Claude AI models.
Anthropic is establishing an in-house team to design custom chips for its Claude AI models, a move confirmed by the company. This initiative aims to enhance the speed and efficiency of its AI systems, addressing the current shortage of specialized chips required for advanced AI development and large-scale deployment. The company is actively hiring engineers with expertise across the hardware and software stack to co-design chips and AI models.
This development follows a Reuters report from April indicating Anthropic's consideration of designing its own AI chips. The startup emphasized that custom silicon is the latest step in its diversified hardware strategy, which will continue to include technology from Amazon Web Services, Google, Nvidia, and AMD. Designing advanced AI chips is a costly endeavor, estimated at roughly half a billion dollars, involving skilled engineers and meticulous manufacturing processes.
Separately, AI infrastructure startup Volta Infra announced a $10 billion, six-year cloud computing contract with Anthropic. Volta, valued at $2.4 billion, also revealed a $5 billion AI infrastructure program. The contract with Anthropic reportedly involves 133 megawatts of capacity at a Bitdeer data center in Norway, utilizing Nvidia's chips. Volta has raised $300 million in seed and Series A financing, with its Norway project being the first in a pipeline exceeding one gigawatt of power capacity.