Anthropic just hired OpenAI's second-ever chip engineer

anthropic hired clive chan, who was the second engineer in openai's custom chip program, to likely lead or assist in developing proprietary hardware as both companies prepare for public listings. chan previously worked on openai's custom silicon and its partnership with broadcom, and his linkedin suggests a focus on maximizing performance per unit of energy. the hire suggests anthropic is serious about designing custom chips to improve inference margins, reducing reliance on google tpus and amazon chips. this move intensifies the infrastructure race between openai and anthropic, where vertical integration is becoming a key differentiator for scaling efficiently.