Microsoft, Nvidia, and Anthropic Form $30 Billion Strategic Partnership in Major AI Infrastructure Deal

Anthropic signs $30 billion deal with Amazon to deploy Claude on AWS -- Nvidia and Microsoft jointly invest $15 billion into AI firm as it becomes first provider across Azure, AWS and Google

Another day, another landmark infrastructure deal between some of the world's largest tech companies. This time, it's Claude developer, Anthropic, which has struck a new partnership with Microsoft and Nvidia, as per the company's official blog. Anthropic will now use Microsoft's Azure servers to run Claude, purchasing $30 billion worth of server compute capacity over the coming years, with a pledge to help develop an additional gigawatt of compute using Nvidia Blackwell and Vera Rubin GPUs. This deal will also see Nvidia and Anthropic work closely together to optimize future Nvidia architectures for better Claude performance and efficiency, and Anthropic models for Nvidia hardware. Getting Claude on Azure also makes it more widely available. Various Claude models will be available to Microsoft Foundry customers, making it easier for businesses to access Anthropic AI. It will also be accessible through Copilot in GitHub, Copilot Studio, and Microsoft 365. Although this is a big win for all the companies involved, it's arguably Anthropic's big coming-out party. It's now the only major AI developer where Claude runs on all the big-three cloud platforms - Azure, AWS, and Google Cloud. The companies are also becoming ever more intertwined, with Microsoft and Nvidia jointly investing $15 billion in Anthropic. In the wake of the deal's announcement, Anthropic's valuation is now thought to be around $350 billion, close to double its September valuation of $183 billion. This further circularizes the AI industry, making all these companies even more interdependent. It's not that the industry is too big to fail; it's the threat that if any of them do, they might take all of the others with them. Microsoft was an early investor in Anthropic rival and ChatGPT developer, OpenAI, and it doubled down on that earlier this year when it restructured its working relationship deal with OpenAI, taking an ownership stake while retaining access to its model data. Now, it's heavily invested in Anthropic and its Claude AI platform, which competes directly with OpenAI. Although that might create conflicts of interest, Microsoft seems keen to back every horse it can, so that whoever ends up making the best models, Microsoft is there to take advantage regardless. In that, it has a clear partner in Nvidia. Although Nvidia isn't quite as directly invested in AI transforming Windows 11, it does want the AI demand to continue apace. At this time, Nvidia is arguably one of the few companies that has directly earned any material profit from AI. Everyone else is spending, investing, and building out the infrastructure they claim they need, not to be left behind by the competition. Nvidia is selling all the hardware for that, and with its plans for an annual upgrade cycle for data center products, it needs the companies doing the buying to stay afloat, too. That's why it's investing in OpenAI, xAI, CoreWeave, Nebius Group, ARM Holdings, and a range of other companies building AI-first products and services. With Nvidia's massive $4 trillion+ valuation and enormous orders on the books from every tech and AI firm out there, it's investing a lot of its profit back into the industry that powers it, ensuring its ongoing development even as warnings of a bubble continue to loom. Microsoft is doing something very similar, and CEO Satya Nadella even alluded to that in his public discussion of the Anthropic deal. "As an industry, we really need to move beyond any type of zero-sum narrative or winner-take-all hype," he said, via CNBC. "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. The opportunity is simply too big to approach any other way." This too-interconnected-to-fail model was parroted by Google CEO, Sundar Pinchai just a few days ago too. "No firm is going to be immune," if AI companies overinvest, he said. Anthropic made clear in its public statements about the deal that even with Microsoft and Nvidia's new investment, it's still an Amazon company at heart. Anthropic named Amazon's AWS cloud as its primary cloud provider in 2023 and its primary AI training partner in 2024. That's not going to change, it said. But Amazon is looking elsewhere, too. Amazon struck a deal with OpenAI just a few weeks ago, where the AI developer would purchase $38 billion worth of compute on AWS servers to expand OpenAI services. Amazon will reportedly give OpenAI access to hundreds of thousands of chips in its EC2 UltraServers, scaling to "tens of millions" of CPUs in due time. Everyone is invested in or has contracts with just about everyone else in the industry, and this latest Anthropic deal just cements that even further. It feels more notable since it comes in the wake of increasing concerns from analysts and financial leaders that the AI industry is looking increasingly like a bubble. But valuations appear to reward it, regardless. Despite Anthropic announcing a $50 billion commitment with Fluidstack just a few days ago, and now another $30 billion with Microsoft, its stock is now worth almost $170 billion more than it was before all the announcements, which could be enough to secure further financing. How much road that gives them while they and everyone like them tries to figure out the business model for AI, remains to be seen.

AI innovations to get robust boost as 3 tech giants join hands

Three new tech giants have announced a strategic partnership that will help scale rapidly-growing Claude AI model on Microsoft Azure. For this, Microsoft, NVIDIA and Anthropic have joined hands. As part of the partnership, NVIDIA and Microsoft are committing to invest up to $10 billion and up to $5 billion respectively in Anthropic. For the first time, NVIDIA and Anthropic are establishing a deep technology partnership to support Anthropic's future growth. Anthropic and NVIDIA will collaborate on design and engineering, with the goal of optimizing Anthropic models for the best possible performance, efficiency, and TCO, and optimizing future NVIDIA architectures for Anthropic workloads. Anthropic's compute commitment will initially be up to one gigawatt of compute capacity with NVIDIA Grace Blackwell and Vera Rubin systems.

Big AI companies and the people that supply big AI companies are once again investing billions of dollars in one another: this time, Nvidia, Microsoft and Anthropic

A LOT of money is being thrown around in the AI sphere. The latest of these multi-trillion dollar deals comes to us in the form of a new strategic partnership between Nvidia, Microsoft, and Claude creator Anthropic. Nvidia announced the deal on Tuesday, with its two partners making their own announcements simultaneously. Nvidia's post explains that as ChatGPT competitor Claude is being scaled up using Microsoft Azure -- which itself uses Nvidia's hardware -- it made sense for the three companies to enter into a more formal relationship. Hence, Anthropic is committing to buy up $30 billion worth of Azure compute capacity, while Microsoft has agreed to invest $5 billion back into Anthropic, and Nvidia will also offer up $10 billion to Claude's creator. It's almost more money than my bog-standard grey matter wants to compute. But back to silicon -- Nvidia says it will also collaborate with Anthropic at a technical level. The company says the pair will co-ordinate "on design and engineering, with the goal of optimizing Anthropic models for the best possible performance, efficiency and TCO, and optimizing future NVIDIA architectures for Anthropic workloads." Anthropic has committed to 1 gigawatt of compute capacity initially, with Nvidia hoping deployment of its Grace Blackwell and Vera Rubin systems will help the AI company easily reach that threshold. As for Microsoft, it's obviously still going hard on AI. For a start, Microsoft Foundry is getting even more models in the form of Claude Sonnet 4.5, Claude Opus 4.1, and Claude Haiku 4.5. Not only that, but apparently, "Microsoft has also committed to continuing access for Claude across Microsoft's Copilot family, including GitHub Copilot, Microsoft 365 Copilot, and Copilot Studio." Add to that the fact Nvidia is currently enjoying a $5 trillion valuation thanks to the AI industry's reliance on its hardware, or the fact that Anthropic competitor OpenAI is valued at $500 billion, and it may sound like the good times are well and truly rolling. However, I've been hearing rumblings of an AI bubble for some time now, with one market analyst estimating that it's 17 times bigger than the dotcom goldrush, and four times larger than the subprime bubble that caused the 2008 crash. But that's just one market analyst, right? Well, that's alongside one of the world's top bankers saying he's "far more worried than others" about whether the AI bubble will burst. Okay, but it's not like the CEO of Google is doomsaying about it -- oh, wait, what? He said that, in the event of an AI bubble burst, "No company is going to be immune, including us." And that was all after OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said "Someone is going to lose a phenomenal amount of money" due to ill-advised AI over-investment? Yeah, it really sounds like big tech is feeling the heat about something -- just not enough to stop flinging billions of dollars at each other.

Microsoft and Nvidia Just Signed a Multibillion-Dollar Deal With Anthropic. Here's What It Really Means for Investors. | The Motley Fool

Microsoft (MSFT +0.13%) and Nvidia (NVDA 0.22%) just announced a partnership with foundational large language model (LLM) maker Anthropic. As part of the deal, Anthropic has agreed to buy $30 billion of compute capacity from Microsoft's cloud computing unit, Azure, and to commit to an additional 1 gigawatt of compute capacity. One gigawatt of compute capacity is presently valued with a cost around $50 billion, with $35 billion of that the cost of graphics processing units (GPUs). In return, Microsoft will invest up to $10 billion in Anthropic, which now has a $350 billion valuation, while Nvidia will invest $5 billion. Anthropic will also work with Nvidia to optimize its artificial intelligence (AI) model designs for use with Nvidia's future GPU architecture. The $350 billion valuation is a big jump from the $183 billion valuation Anthropic received in its prior funding round in September. Anthropic already had investments from both Amazon (AMZN +2.58%) and Alphabet (GOOGL +5.74%) (GOOG +5.62%). Amazon is the company's primary cloud computing provider and main training partner, and it will remain in these roles after this deal. Amazon recently opened up Project Rainier, which is an $11 billion AI data center exclusively designed to train Anthropic models and run inference for the company. The data center uses Amazon's custom Trainium 2 AI chips. Last month, Anthropic struck a deal with Alphabet for access to more than 1 gigawatt of computing capacity that will come online next year. As part of the deal, Anthropic will use Alphabet's custom Tensor Processing Units (TPUs) to help train the next generation of its Claude AI models. At the time, Anthropic said it chose to expand its use of Alphabet's TPUs due to their efficiency and "strong price-performance." For Microsoft, the deal with Anthropic continues the company's quest to diversify away from OpenAI. While OpenAI is a great partner and should remain one, the two companies are now set to forge their own paths in AI. As such, striking a deal with another leading AI model company is a smart move. Overall, this is a beneficial deal for Microsoft. First, it gets a nice commitment for Azure, which should help drive revenue growth. In addition, it adds another leading AI model to its platform, giving its customers a viable choice outside of OpenAI. That's a win-win. Whether or not Microsoft's investment in Anthropic will pay off, given the company's valuation, is up in the air, but at the end of the day, it is a small price to pay for the additional business coming its way. For Nvidia, the deal with Anthropic increases commitments from a customer that has been using a combination of GPUs and ASICs (application-specific integrated circuits) to power its AI workloads. Microsoft primarily uses Nvidia's GPUs to power Azure, so Nvidia will be selling a lot of its chips as part of this partnership. Nvidia working with Anthropic to optimize designs should also help ensure that the LLM maker remains a user of its GPUs well into the future, despite Anthropic taking a multipronged approach with AI chips. The deal is also another example of Nvidia being willing to help finance its own customers. This deal is much smaller than its up to $100 billion investment into OpenAI, but the motivation behind it is similar: ensuring its customers have the cash to buy its chips. Meanwhile, Nvidia has a lot of excess cash, so investing in other parts of the AI value chain isn't a bad idea. Nvidia and others also don't want to see OpenAI become too powerful, and this investment helps one of its chief rivals. In fact, the more competition in the AI model space, the better it is for Nvidia, which is the main provider with its GPUs. Overall, the deal is good for both Microsoft and Nvidia investors, as it will add some incremental revenue growth in the coming years. However, it's far from a game changer for either, as OpenAI and Anthropic are both clearly also trying to spread their bets out. That said, as long as there is an AI race, it's good news, especially for Nvidia.

Anthropic Will Spend $30 Billion on Azure. Could This Be Microsoft's Most Important AI Deal Yet? | The Motley Fool

Microsoft (MSFT 1.32%), along with Nvidia, has sealed what appears to be a landmark agreement with Anthropic. The three tech giants will become each other's customers in a major partnership. Under the terms of the deal, Anthropic will purchase $30 billion worth of Azure's computing capacity from Microsoft. Anthropic will scale its Claude AI model on Azure, running it on Nvidia architecture powered by Grace CPUs and Blackwell and Vera Rubin GPUs. This is obviously huge for Microsoft. But it's not Microsoft's most important artificial intelligence (AI) deal. This new agreement, combined with the fact that Claude is now available on the three largest platforms, will give the chatbot a competitive advantage. It should also increase Claude's popularity, particularly thanks to a move that will bring Claude for Business to Microsoft Foundry. In terms of dealmaking, investors should remember that Microsoft has grown to a $3.5 trillion market cap behemoth, and it has been a publicly traded company since 1986. Even with that long history, this is one of its largest deals. Nonetheless, it pales in comparison to Microsoft's relationship with OpenAI. The relationship between OpenAI and Microsoft dates back to 2019, predating the 2021 founding of Anthropic. But time is not the only factor. Microsoft and OpenAI announced an updated agreement on Oct. 28. At that time, the public learned that Microsoft's position in privately held OpenAI is valued at around $135 billion. That represents a 27% stake based on OpenAI's valuation from recent fundraising rounds. Additionally, OpenAI is under contract with Microsoft to purchase $250 billion worth of Azure services through 2032. That's significantly more than the $30 billion deal Microsoft just inked with Anthropic. The recent evolution of Microsoft's agreement with OpenAI likely also paved the way for its Anthropic deal. Under its terms. OpenAI and Microsoft are each free to "independently continue advancing innovation and growth." In other words, Microsoft can partner with whichever players in the AI space it wants to. Moreover, now Microsoft will provide the computational horsepower to both Anthropic's Claude AI and OpenAI's ChatGPT, making Azure the critical cloud ecosystem for a significant portion of the AI environment. OpenAI's latest agreement with Microsoft explicitly spells out where the companies can work separately and together on artificial general intelligence (AGI). Analysts often refer to AGI as "human-level intelligence AI," meaning that, in theory, such systems could match or surpass human capabilities in cognitive tasks. Depending on where AGI advances, Microsoft is now more strongly positioned to capitalize on those innovations. These deals position Microsoft to benefit from more technological innovations driven by two of the most advanced AI models. It also provides it with the flexibility to work more with Anthropic should its offerings stand out over time. Ultimately, the OpenAI partnership remains Microsoft's most important AI agreement, but this Anthropic deal cements Microsoft's position as a more critical AI company.

AI Leader Anthropic Gets $15B Boost From Microsoft and NVIDI

Anthropic AI is a startup by former OpenAI staff, focused on building safe, reliable AI that handles complex tasks responsibly. What are Claude AI Models used for? Claude AI Models help businesses automate workflows, generate content, summarise documents, and support decision-making with stable, reliable, and context-aware outputs. How does NVIDIA Anthropic funding impact AI hardware development? The investment by NVIDIA guarantees the requirement of its GPUs, which in turn fosters technological changes and guarantees that AI startups like Anthropic will have the right infrastructure to grow. How is Anthropic different from OpenAI or Google's AI models? Anthropic is committed to safety and predictability and reasoning that is consistent, thereby providing an AI alternative that is less prone to producing unexpected or unreliable outputs. How will this investment affect the competitive AI landscape? The investment will speed up the growth, intensify the competition, and bring the role of cloud infrastructure and computing power in the future development of AI more prominently.

Could the Anthropic Partnership Be Nvidia's Most Important AI Deal Yet? | The Motley Fool

Nvidia just made another blockbuster artificial intelligence (AI) deal. Here's what you need to know. Nvidia (NVDA 1.06%) has asserted itself as the leader of the artificial intelligence (AI) data revolution, primarily because of the essentialness of its graphic processing units (GPUs). Nvidia's GPUs are the brains behind the AI applications driving the new tech boom, like ChatGPT and similar generative AI tools, and the company is estimated to have more than a 90% share of the data center GPU market, which is where the AI revolution is happening. The chip giant's success is the fruit of decades of planning and investment, beginning with its invention of the GPU in 1999 and followed but its CUDA software library that helps make its GPUs easy to use for developers, creating stickiness. However, since the initial frenzy following the ChatGPT launch, Nvidia has established itself as the kingpin of AI in another way. It's forged a vast network of partnerships and alliances, connecting it to many of the other top players in AI, and reinforcing their dependence on Nvidia. Those include: On the heels of the partnerships with Intel and OpenAI, Nvidia is now making a big move with another AI start-up, Anthropic. Microsoft and Nvidia announced a blockbuster deal Tuesday morning with Anthropic. Microsoft will invest $5 billion in the start-up, while Nvidia will put in $10 billion, a move that will push Anthropic's valuation up to around $350 billion, about double where it was in its last funding round in September. Both tech giants will form strategic partnerships with Anthropic as well. Anthropic has committed to purchase $30 billion of compute capacity from Microsoft Azure and to contract additional compute capacity of up to 1 gigawatt, which comes from Nvidia chips, after an initial commitment of 1 gigawatt from Grace Blackwell and the upcoming Vera Rubin systems. The two companies will also work together to optimize Nvidia architecture for Anthropic workloads. With the investment and partnership with Anthropic, Nvidia is tying itself to the No. 2 generative AI start-up, hedging its bet against OpenAI. Microsoft is doing the same thing, in fact. Doing so makes sense for Nvidia. By investing in these companies, it ensures it has a stake in them and a seat at the table. The partnerships mean that the start-ups are even more dependent on Nvidia, and it helps give it an edge over the competition, though OpenAI also signed a deal with AMD. The surge in Anthropic's valuation could add to concerns about a bubble, but the start-up is aiming for $9 billion in run-rate revenue by the end of the year, and nearly tripling run-rate revenue to $26 billion. Based on that forecast, it's understandable why Nvidia and Microsoft would want to own a piece of Anthropic. For Nvidia, the Anthropic deal might be its most important deal yet -- that title probably goes to the OpenAI deal -- but it's another savvy move that should only further cement its status as the dominant force in AI.