- Anthropic has hired Amir Salek, the engineer who founded and led Google’s custom silicon division, including its Tensor Processing Unit line, from 2013 to 2022.
- Bloomberg reported the hire Friday as part of Anthropic’s move to design its own AI chips, following a string of specialist hires the company has made this summer.
- Salek spent the past four years as a senior managing director at Cerberus Capital Management, investing in semiconductor and AI companies.
Anthropic has hired Amir Salek, the engineer who built Google’s custom chip program from scratch, as the company works to design its own silicon for Claude, Bloomberg reported Friday.
The hire lands just over two weeks after Anthropic publicly confirmed it was assembling an in-house chip design team, advertising engineering roles paying up to $485,000 a year. Salek is close to a template hire: he is credited with standing up the exact function, in-house AI chip design at hyperscaler scale, that Anthropic is now trying to build for itself.
A TPU Founder, Then a Dealmaker #
Salek spent eight years at Nvidia, where he founded and led a system-on-a-chip design group and worked on GPU and Tegra chips, before Google recruited him in 2013 to start its custom silicon effort from the ground up.
He built and ran that division through 2022, overseeing multiple generations of the Tensor Processing Unit along with Edge TPU and other specialized chips. The TPU line remains the backbone of Google’s own AI infrastructure, and Google now sells TPU capacity to outside customers, Anthropic among them.
Since leaving Google, Salek has been a senior managing director at Cerberus Capital Management, investing in semiconductor, AI and aerospace companies. Cerberus’s own website continued to list him in that role as of this week.
An Expensive Bet Anthropic Has Mostly Rented Until Now #
Anthropic’s chip ambitions have so far run mostly through outside partners.
Google backed a $35 billion chip financing package for Anthropic in June and supplies the company with TPUs directly. AMD followed in July with an investment of up to $5 billion tied to deploying its chips in Anthropic’s data centers, while Anthropic has separately discussed a custom chip with Samsung and pressed SK Hynix for supply.
A dedicated in-house design team, and now a hire who has already built one before, marks a shift from renting capacity toward owning the hardware itself.
Anthropic has not said what title Salek holds or whether he has fully left Cerberus, leaving the shape of his new role, and how central he will be to any chip Anthropic eventually ships, still unconfirmed.