← Glossary Person
Amir Salek
The engineer who founded Google's TPU chip programme and shipped its first seven generations, hired by Anthropic in August 2026.
Amir Salek started Google’s Tensor Processing Unit programme and led it through seven generations of chips before leaving the company in 2022. That makes him one of a very small number of people who have taken a custom AI chip from an idea to something running at data-centre scale, repeatedly.
After Google he spent time as a senior managing director at the investment firm Cerberus Capital Management. In August 2026 he joined Anthropic’s compute team, which is the clearest signal so far that the company wants to design silicon of its own rather than keep buying from Nvidia, Google and Amazon.
Mentioned in