Key points
- Anthropic confirmed Wednesday it is building an in-house team to design custom chips for Claude, and said it will keep buying from AWS, Google, Nvidia (NVDA) and AMD.
- Its Custom Silicon listings pay $320,000 to $485,000. The research role that teaches Claude to design chips pays $500,000 to $850,000.
- Chip stocks did not trade on it. AMD was down 6.5% on its own earnings and Nvidia was up 3.7% on a SpaceX order at 11:36 a.m. Eastern Wednesday.
Anthropic has posted a job that pays up to $850,000 a year to teach Claude how to design computer chips. The engineers who would actually design those chips are listed at up to $485,000.
The company said Wednesday that it is building an in-house team to design custom chips for its Claude models. Reuters reported in April that Anthropic was weighing it, and that's the first time the company has confirmed it publicly.
The goal is to "co-design hardware and models so that Claude runs faster," a company spokesperson told Business Insider. Anthropic said that custom silicon is the latest step in its multi-chip strategy, and not a break with its suppliers. The company will continue to run Claude on hardware from Amazon Web Services, Google (GOOGL), Nvidia (NVDA) and Advanced Micro Devices (AMD).
The Silicon Engineer listing sits on a team Anthropic calls Custom Silicon. The job is based in San Francisco, New York and Seattle, and it was posted at $320,000 to $485,000. "You will be one of a small number of people covering a large surface," the posting reads. Whoever takes it would pick the technology and the intellectual property the chip is built from, and decide what Anthropic builds itself against what it buys or licenses.
According to the same listing, the company wants "direct personal contribution to silicon that taped out and shipped, with ownership you can speak to in detail." A tape-out is the point where a finished design is handed to a factory to be manufactured. "This is a role for someone who has shipped silicon, has a realistic relationship with schedules, and is comfortable making consequential calls," it says.
A second posting, for a Hardware Systems Architect, was listed at the same pay band. "You'll have Claude as a genuine collaborator," that description states. "We expect this team to push on what AI-assisted hardware design and review can look like." That didn't appear in Wednesday's statement.
The best-paid job on the chip effort is not a chip job
Anthropic is also hiring a Research Engineer for Chip Design RL, and that role was posted at $500,000 to $850,000. It sits on the Code RL team, a separate group from Custom Silicon. The work is building reinforcement learning environments for "agentic RTL generation, design (including formal) verification, physical design optimization."
RTL, or register transfer level, is the code an engineer writes to describe what a chip does before any of it becomes a physical layout. Both postings ask for the same core background. Candidates need to have taped out chips before, and to be fluent with the commercial software the industry designs on. The research job pays $365,000 more at the top of its range than the chip designers do, and it's a bet that the model gets good enough at the work to be worth it.
What Anthropic is already paying for compute
The in-house team is being added on top of compute commitments that already exceed $100 billion.
| Compute partner | Commitment | What it covers |
|---|---|---|
| Amazon (AMZN) | More than $100 billion over ten years, April 20, 2026 | Up to 5 GW; Trainium2 through Trainium4 |
| Google (GOOGL) | Tens of billions, October 2025 | As many as 1 million TPUs, over 1 GW |
| Broadcom (AVGO) with Google | Expanded April 6, 2026, terms undisclosed | Multiple GW of next-generation TPUs from 2027 |
More than a million Trainium2 chips are already running for Anthropic at Amazon's Project Rainier site. The April Google expansion added multiple gigawatts of next-generation TPU capacity starting in 2027. "This groundbreaking partnership with Google and Broadcom is a continuation of our disciplined approach to scaling infrastructure," said Krishna Rao, chief financial officer of Anthropic, when that deal was announced. The same release put Anthropic's run-rate revenue at $30 billion, up from about $9 billion at the end of 2025. Another $10 billion over six years was added on Tuesday for capacity at a Norway data center.
Anthropic hasn't settled on who would actually build the chip. Reuters and The Information have both reported early talks with Samsung Electronics about a custom chip on a 2nm process. Those conversations were described as preliminary. The company has yet to decide what the chip would do or how powerful it needs to be. Samsung's foundry business signed a $200 billion agreement with Broadcom in July.
However, chip stocks were trading on other news on Wednesday. AMD was 6.5% lower at $484.87 at 11:36 a.m. Eastern than the previous close of $518.58 on Tuesday, after it reported second quarter results the night before. Revenue was $11.54 billion, up 50% from $7.69 billion a year earlier. Adjusted earnings were $1.66 a share against the $1.62 analysts expected. Gross margin came in at 54% versus a 56% consensus.
"It was priced for something much closer to a blowout," said Shay Boloor, chief market strategist at Futurum. "It was priced for an exceptional result, and this was not an exceptional result."
Nvidia was trading 3.7% higher at $219.84 than the previous close of $211.94 on Tuesday. Elon Musk had said on SpaceX's first earnings call as a public company that SpaceX will build its AI infrastructure exclusively on Nvidia hardware.
Broadcom was up 0.7% at $420.92.
Marvell Technology (MRVL) was down 1.0% at $216.50 and Taiwan Semiconductor (TSM) was down 0.1% at $416.72.
The hardware architect posting sets out one of the first tasks for whoever takes the job. "Prototype an AI-assisted workflow for partner design review and spec consistency checking, and put it to work on a live platform."
Prices via Robinhood, 11:36 a.m. Eastern on August 5, 2026. Anthropic hasn't said when the chip would arrive. Nothing here is investment advice.
