Microsoft and Nvidia are teaming up to pump a combined $15 billion into AI startup Anthropic, aiming to bulk up infrastructure and break away from depending too much on OpenAI, according to a blog post released on Tuesday.
This deal gives Microsoft a $5 billion seat at the table, while Nvidia (the most valuable company on earth) is going all-in with a $10 billion commitment.
The decision comes as Anthropic’s valuation explodes to about $350 billion, nearly doubling from just a few months ago when it was pegged at $183 billion.
The startup was founded in 2021 by former OpenAI execs, including CEO Dario Amodei, and has been on a rocket ride ever since. While OpenAI has its ChatGPT moment, Anthropic is betting big on Claude, its rival large language model series.
Anthropic agrees to massive compute buys from Microsoft and Nvidia
As part of this multi-billion-dollar pact, Anthropic is locking in $30 billion worth of compute capacity from Microsoft’s Azure, plus additional power commitments totaling up to one gigawatt.
Not stopping there, the company also plans to snap up to one gigawatt of compute from Nvidia, specifically using its high-performance Grace Blackwell and Vera Rubin systems. That’s a crazy amount of power, enough to fuel some scarily serious AI model scaling.
“This is a dream come true for us,” said Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang in a video on Tuesday. He added, “We’ve admired the work of Anthropic and Dario for a long time, and this is the first time we are going to deeply partner with Anthropic to accelerate Claude.”
Nvidia and Anthropic say they’ll now work side by side on designing systems that squeeze the most out of Nvidia’s chips and make Anthropic’s models run faster and better.
For Microsoft, this deal shows it’s not married to OpenAI. The company may have dropped billions into Sam Altman’s outfit, including a $135 billion stake that makes up about 27% of OpenAI’s for-profit arm, but it’s clearly not putting all its chips in one place.
By partnering directly with Anthropic, Microsoft gets more leverage in the AI arms race, especially when it comes to infrastructure.
And while Microsoft steps in with Azure, Amazon isn’t walking away. Anthropic made it clear Tuesday that AWS is still its main cloud provider and will stay on as its primary training partner through 2024.
Amazon first backed the startup last year, and it looks like that relationship is still very much intact.
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella also chimed in during Tuesday’s announcement, saying, “As an industry, we really need to move beyond any type of zero-sum narrative or winner-take-all hype. What’s required now is the hard work of building broad, durable capabilities together so that this technology can deliver real, tangible local success for every country, every sector, and every customer.”
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