Bloomberg reports that UK chip designer Fractile is deep in discussions to bank roughly $600M at a $6.5B pre-money valuation, more than six times its May mark.
The jump follows an initial $250M deal to supply AI inference chips to Anthropic, with the two sides discussing a larger contract down the line. Fractile’s hardware is not expected to be ready for deployment until 2027, so the Anthropic order is an early signal of confidence rather than a live supply line.
The May raise was $220M at about $1B, led by Accel, Founders Fund and Factorial Funds, following an earlier reported $200M round at the same valuation. The steep climb since then tracks almost entirely with the Anthropic relationship.
Founded in 2022 by Walter Goodwin, then a PhD student at Oxford University’s Robotics Institute, Fractile bets that inference speed, not raw training power, will become the industry’s real bottleneck. Its chips use an in-memory compute design, storing data beside the transistors doing the calculations rather than shuttling it to separate memory chips, an approach the company says can run large language models faster and at lower cost.
If the round closes at the reported level, Fractile would rank among Europe’s most valuable AI chip startups, a bright spot for a continent eager to host its own challengers to Nvidia.
