Clive Chan — part of OpenAI’s custom chip program since its early days — just announced he’s leaving to join Anthropic. His words: “I haven’t been able to shake the pull to climb a new mountain from the bottom.”
Chan described OpenAI’s hardware team as “extraordinary” — then left anyway, drawn by Anthropic’s “values, ambition, and the pace and intensity of the past few days.”
Anthropic just filed its S-1 at $965 billion. Building custom silicon capability before an IPO signals to public market investors that you’re reducing Nvidia dependency and building durable infrastructure advantages.
Custom ASICs are growing 44.6% in 2026 — 3x faster than merchant GPUs. Google has TPU. Amazon has Trainium. Microsoft has Maia. OpenAI was building its own. Now the person who helped build that program is taking the knowledge to Anthropic.
The Talent War Is the Real Competition
The AI race is usually framed as models or infrastructure. But underneath both is a talent competition — and talent moves tell you where momentum is shifting.
Anthropic’s $65B Series H and IPO filing create the equity incentive that makes them competitive for top talent. Chan’s move suggests the pitch is landing: join before the IPO, build from the ground up, own the outcome.
For OpenAI, losing a chip lead to its most direct competitor is infrastructure knowledge walking across the street to the company filing for a trillion-dollar IPO.
Gennaro is the creator of FourWeekMBA, which reached about four million business people, comprising C-level executives, investors, analysts, product managers, and aspiring digital entrepreneurs in 2022 alone | He is also Director of Sales for a high-tech scaleup in the AI Industry | In 2012, Gennaro earned an International MBA with emphasis on Corporate Finance and Business Strategy.
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