Coatue in talks to form multibillion-dollar joint venture with MatX to finance chip purchases

Coatue Management, the hedge fund powerhouse led by Philippe Laffont, is in discussions to create a multibillion-dollar joint venture with MatX, an AI chip startup built by former Google engineers. The goal: finance massive chip purchases that could help MatX scale its hardware into a legitimate alternative to Nvidia’s grip on the AI silicon market. The talks are still preliminary, and neither party has publicly confirmed the arrangement. What MatX is building, and why it matters MatX was founded in 2023 by Reiner Pope and Mike Gunter, both of whom previously worked on Google’s Tensor Processing Units, the custom chips that power much of Google’s internal AI infrastructure. The startup isn’t trying to build a general-purpose GPU competitor. Instead, it’s designing silicon specifically optimized for large language model workloads, targeting superior throughput and latency for the exact kind of compute that companies like Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google are consuming at staggering rates. The company’s flagship product, the MatX One chip, is slated for volume production in 2027. MatX has already raised roughly $605 million in total funding. The bulk of that came from a $500 million Seri...