Coatue Management is in early talks with MatX, the AI chip startup founded by former Google TPU engineers, to create a multibillion-dollar venture that would finance chip purchases, The Information reported on September 4. The venture has not been confirmed by either company, and conversations remain preliminary.
Reiner Pope and Mike Gunter, both veterans of Google’s TPU program, founded MatX in 2023. Its flagship MatX One processor is slated for volume production in 2027, and the startup has raised about $605M to date, most of it in a $500M Series B. Anthropic is said to have weighed buying MatX outright for about $7B before pivoting to a partnership path.
Coatue, with tens of billions under management, carries big stakes in chip names such as TSMC and Micron. A financing arm tied to MatX would follow a growing pattern in AI infrastructure in which investors, rather than cloud giants, bankroll hardware fleets and lease them to model developers who cannot secure enough supply on their own.
For MatX, the vehicle could help early customers pay for systems built around its silicon before volume shipments begin. For Coatue, it is a way to profit from the AI buildout without betting on any single cloud provider, while deepening its exposure to the challengers lining up against Nvidia’s data center dominance.
