The · Tom's Hardware
Anthropic in early talks to buy DRAM-less AI inference chips from UK outfit
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Anthropic has reportedly held early discussions with London-based chip startup Fractile about purchasing the company's inference accelerators, The Information reported on Friday, citing people familiar with the matter.
Key facts
- Fractile is now in talks to raise $200 million at a $1 billion-plus valuation, with Founders Fund, 8VC, and Accel among the potential investors
- The company's annualized revenue run rate passed $30 billion in March, up from around $9 billion at the end of 2025, and its inference costs have been a drag on gross margins
- The company raised $15 million in seed funding, co-led by Kindred Capital, the NATO Innovation Fund, and Oxford Science Enterprises
- Founded in 2022 by Oxford PhD Walter Goodwin, Fractile is developing an inference chip that co-locates memory and compute on the same die using SRAM rather than shuttling data to separate DRAM chips
Summary
Fractile's chips aren’t expected to reach commercial readiness until around 2027, placing any deployment well outside Anthropic's near-term procurement plans and roughly inside the same window as its Google-Broadcom TPU partnership. Founded in 2022 by Oxford PhD Walter Goodwin, Fractile is developing an inference chip that co-locates memory and compute on the same die using SRAM rather than shuttling data to separate DRAM chips. Goodwin told Fortune in July 2024 that Fractile's design stores data needed for computations directly next to the transistors that perform the arithmetic, rather than relying on off-chip DRAM. The company raised $15 million in seed funding, co-led by Kindred Capital, the NATO Innovation Fund, and Oxford Science Enterprises.