Fridman's Take on AI Chips: AMD & Anthropic

**Lex Fridman** (0:00)
Anthropic is building their own custom silicone team to design their own AI chips, and AMD has just unveiled something called the Helios Rack system. Their goal is to challenge Nvidia head-on in AI data centers. Anthropic is upgrading Claude's voice mode. It's gonna be now running on Opus and Sonnet. And Google Cloud revenue jumped 82% to $24.8 billion if anyone has been following Google for the last few weeks when they've released how much their AI spending is and their stock took a massive hit. Well, evidently, this is the reason why they announced that. OpenAI and Anthropic are both lobbying Washington to curb Chinese open-weight AI. We've talked about this a lot on the podcast, but this is kind of the latest news on the lobbying front. If you want to get a deep dive on these and a dozen more stories every single day, I'd love for you to check out aichatdaily.com. That's my own sister website, news site that is partnered with this podcast. It's essentially like a show notes, but it also goes deeper and has extra stories I don't cover in here. There's dozens of stories every single day on all the latest AI news, and there's a newsletter that you can subscribe to on the website. So every single morning, if you like, you will get the top five AI news stories straight into your inbox to keep you up to date with everything happening in AI, and you get some really quick breakdowns of all of the facts so that you understand what's going on. The website is aichatdaily.com.
The first story I wanted to talk about is the fact that Anthropic is building their own AI chip design team, and it's going to be for creating custom hardware for Claude. It's the same thing that OpenAI, Google and Meta, they're all doing it right now. And the big reason is everyone wants to get off of Nvidia. These companies are incredibly dependent on Nvidia. Nvidia basically has quotas and they dole out their GPUs and their chips, and they only give a certain amount to different companies, and nobody wants to feel bottlenecked by one player that they're obviously spending a ton of money on. So, everyone's building their own chips. Right now, they're also scouting Samsung as a manufacturing partner, which is ending Anthropic's status as basically the last major AI lab without a public silicone program. They're like, all right, it's time to get serious on that one. Anthropic currently relies on a bunch of different suppliers. So there's AWS, Google, Nvidia, AMD, all of them give them compute, but of course that means that they are going to control the pricing allocation or any of the roadmap timing. OpenAI shipped their Broadcom designed chip, which is called Jalapeno. It's an inference chip and that was in June of this year. Google now runs their own TPUs, Meta is building MTIA accelerators, and Anthropic basically was the only one that wasn't working on this. Custom silicone typically takes between 18 to 24 months to design, and it's going to cost hundreds of millions of dollars per chip version. But every single efficiency gain that they can get on this, compounds across billions of dollars that Anthropic is using for these Claude API calls. So I think this is something that is kind of a play on margin. It's not a shortcut. This is going to take a long time. Anthropic can tune memory and math formats to Claude's exact workloads in a way that no off-the-shelf GPU can really match, but they're also betting on a two-year runway before any of that investment is going to get paid back. So this isn't something that's very quick, but over the long run, this might be a good play for them. After announcing a strategic partnership with in Anthropic, AMD has just unveiled Helios, which is a rack system for AI data centers. And they're saying that this is basically a direct competitor to NVIDIA's products that they have right now. Microsoft, OpenAI, Meta, Oracle and Anthropic have all committed to deploying it at a gigawatt scale, and it's going to be starting shipments later this year. Anthropic and AMD both announced a strategic partnership to deploy up to 2 gigawatts of GPUs on Helios, which is the exact same scale of NVIDIA's largest AI training cluster. So they're really being quite competitive in the market. AMD also introduced VeniceX, which is a data center CPU designed to pair with Helios. And that's going to be launching in 2027, and it's going to compete on kind of this full stack alternative to a lot of the different competitors that are out there. The CEO Lisa Su projected the AI accelerator market to reach 1.4 trillion by 2030, approaching the size of today's entire semiconductor industry. So this one segment of the market, she's saying is going to be as big as the entire semiconductor industry. This is the first time that AMD has landed all five major frontier AI labs on a single rack platform. They have everyone signed up for it. I think this is showing that they're really like a strong contender for a quote unquote second place option for a lot of these massive AI infrastructure build outs that are coming up. The scale of all of these different deals that they've done with these five hyperscalers, I think they're all measured in gigawatts and I think that shows that the hyperscalers are, all of them are ready to diversify away from Nvidia's almost complete dominance. So it looks like we're having a real second player in the market and AMD is going to get some serious market share.