Microsoft has not made the Maia 200 chips available to customers, but it is used in the company's data centers, offering better efficiency than other silicon.
Microsoft is in talks to supply its custom artificial intelligence chips to Anthropic, CNBC confirmed on Thursday.
A deal would represent a win for Microsoft, which is behind cloud rivals Amazon and Google when it comes to supplying clients with special-purpose AI silicon. Microsoft announced its second-generation Maia AI chip in January, but has yet to make it available through its Azure cloud.
Anthropic has not yet closed a deal with Microsoft over the use of the Maia 200, said a person familiar with the deal who asked not to be named in order to discuss internal matters. The Information reported on the discussions earlier on Thursday.
In November, Microsoft said it would invest $5 billion in Anthropic, while Anthropic committed to spending $30 billion on Azure. Anthropic also relies on cloud services from Amazon and Google.
Anthropic has had "difficulties with compute," Dario Amodei, the company's co-founder and CEO, said at an event earlier this month.
Its Claude assistant and Claude Code tool for AI-assisted programming have become more popular this year, which has made Anthropic's needs for computing capacity more dire.
On Wednesday, SpaceX disclosed that Anthropic will pay $1.25 billion per month through May 2029 for computing power.
Historically, Anthropic has leaned heavily on graphics processing units from Nvidia to train and run generative AI models. In April, Anthropic said it would use Amazon Web Services' custom Trainum chips in a 10-year arrangement worth over $100 billion. Anthropic announced plans to use Google's tensor processing unit chips in October.
Anthropic and Microsoft did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Microsoft's Maia 200 "offers over 30% improved tokens per dollar, compared to the latest silicon in our fleet," CEO Satya Nadella said on the company's earnings call in April.
He said the chips are now running in Microsoft data centers in Arizona and Iowa.
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