Microsoft, Nvidia invest in Anthropic in USD30b Azure circular tech tie-up
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The news: Microsoft and Nvidia will invest up to USD15 billion ($23.1 billion) in Anthropic, tying the Claude maker more closely to two major backers of its competitor OpenAI.
Nvidia will contribute as much as USD10 billion and Microsoft up to USD5 billion, the companies said Tuesday. As part of the arrangement, Anthropic has committed to spending at least USD30 billion to use Microsoft’s Azure cloud, including one gigawatt of server capacity fitted with Nvidia’s Grace Blackwell and Vera Rubin systems, according to the company’s statement.
Anthropic’s models, including Claude Sonnet, will also become available on Microsoft’s Foundry service for the first time.
The context: The deal comes as investor concerns grow over so-called circular AI deals, where tech firms fund startups that then spend heavily on their infrastructure.
It follows OpenAI’s USD38 billion cloud agreement with Amazon and is part of a wave of massive spending commitments across the sector.
Microsoft, which has invested more than USD13 billion in OpenAI and holds a 27% stake in its for-profit arm, began using Anthropic’s models in its own products earlier this year.
Founded in 2021 by former OpenAI executives, Anthropic has until now primarily relied on Amazon and Google for cloud infrastructure.
What they said: Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei said the company would use the added capacity to train models, support Microsoft products and sell jointly.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said the deal marks their first deep partnership with Anthropic.
“This is a dream come true for us,” he said. “I can’t wait to go accelerate Claude and Grace Blackwell with NVlink. I’m really, really hoping for an order of magnitude speedup. And that’s going to help you scale even faster, drive down token economics, and really make it possible for us to spread AI everywhere.”
The sources: Microsoft Blog, Bloomberg, The Information
