Anthropic is considering adding UK AI chip startup Fractile as a new supplier of AI server chips, alongside existing providers Google, Amazon and Nvidia, The Information reported on Friday.

Two people who spoke with Fractile executives said Anthropic recently held talks with the London-based startup to buy inference chips. Fractile's chips could ship as soon as next year. The Information said Anthropic is seeking to diversify suppliers to increase its negotiating leverage as it expects annual spending on servers and chips to reach tens of billions of dollars.

Anthropic has reduced reliance on any single supplier by renting a range of server chips, unlike OpenAI or xAI, which depend heavily on Nvidia. More recently, it also signed a deal to buy a large amount of Google's TPUs on terms that allow them to be used outside Google Cloud data centres.

AI companies are seeking alternatives to Nvidia chips for inference to cut costs. Anthropic's gross profit margin for AI product operations fell short of its target last year due to higher-than-expected inference costs. OpenAI faced the same problem. The Information said inference chip startups including Fractile, Cerebras and Groq aim to run AI models more efficiently by using SRAM rather than exchanging data with separate high-bandwidth memory chips.

The Information said the size of the talks between Anthropic and Fractile is not known. It said the talks are at an early stage and a deal may not be reached.