Anthropic lands $15 billion investment from Microsoft, Nvidia
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Anthropic announced new partnerships with Microsoft and Nvidia on Tuesday that include a combined $15 billion investment by the tech giants in the AI developer.
Why it matters: The move underscores how AI's biggest developers and cloud providers are intertwining their models, chips and compute resources, despite being competitors.
The big picture: As part of the deal, Anthropic's Claude will run on Microsoft Azure, making Claude the only frontier model available across all three major cloud providers: Amazon, Google and Microsoft.
- Anthropic has agreed to purchase up to 1 gigawatt of Azure compute capacity and a similar amount of compute power using Nvidia's latest chips.
- Sharing is caring, but the circular nature of these investments has raised eyebrows as partners strike deals to invest giant sums while also gaining large purchase commitments.
Catch up quick: The deal follows the contract revision between Microsoft and OpenAI, which opened up the playing field.
- OpenAI has since inked a deal with Amazon.
Between the lines: The deal comes a day before Nvidia releases quarterly earnings.
- The chip maker is still riding high, becoming the first $5 trillion company last month.
- Investors are skittish, but Wall Street strategists are still giddy.
Yes, but: Anthropic noted in a blog post that "Amazon remains Anthropic's primary cloud provider and training partner."
- Anthropic declined to comment beyond the blog post.
What they're saying: The three companies posted a video describing their expanded partnership.
- "We're increasingly going to be customers of each other. We will use Anthropic models. They will use our infrastructure," Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said on the video.
- Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang specifically pointed to how excited he was about Anthropic's "seminal work in AI safety and the advances in Claude Code."
- Safety and advanced coding are two places where Anthropic competes the most strongly against its biggest competitor, OpenAI.
- "The engineers of Nvidia love Claude Code," Huang said.
What we're watching: As AI companies continue to invest in each other while also agreeing to spend big on each other's products and services, further commitment deals could draw regulatory scrutiny and spark antitrust concerns.
