Microsoft Corp. and Nvidia Corp. are committing to invest up to a combined $15 billion in Anthropic PBC, in a move that ties the AI developer closer to two of the biggest backers for its rival OpenAI.
Anthropic has also committed to purchase $30 billion of computing capacity from Microsoft’s Azure cloud service, the companies said on Tuesday.
The deal is part of a growing number of tie-ups that have seen cloud computing and chips providers back leading AI developers, which in turn spend money on services from those same firms. Investors have grown increasingly concerned about these so-called circular AI deals, with some worrying they are a clear sign of a bubble.
Microsoft shares were down 2.6% on Tuesday.
For Anthropic, the arrangement also brings it closer to Microsoft, which has invested more than $13 billion in OpenAI and played a pivotal role in the ChatGPT maker’s success. In recent months, however, Microsoft and OpenAI have been in more open competition with one another.
“We are increasingly going to be customers of each other — we will use Anthropic models, they will use our infrastructure, and we will go to market together,” said Microsoft Chief Executive Officer Satya Nadella of Anthropic in a video posted Tuesday. “Of course, this all builds on the partnership we have with OpenAI, which remains a critical partner for Microsoft.”
Anthropic, founded in 2021 by former employees of OpenAI, has positioned itself as a reliable, safety-conscious firm that users can trust. While it’s smaller than OpenAI, the company’s Claude chatbot and underlying technology have gained traction with enterprise customers in sectors like finance and health care, as well as with developers.
The company recently raised $13 billion at a $183 billion valuation in September and says it has 300,000 business customers.
Like rival OpenAI, Anthropic is now accelerating its push to build out more infrastructure to support AI development and broader adoption of the technology. Anthropic plans to spend $50 billion to build custom data centers for AI work in several US locations, including Texas and New York.
Anthropic also announced a deal in October with Alphabet Inc.’s Google to dramatically increase the startup’s computing capacity. Google will supply up to 1 million of its specialized AI chips to Anthropic, a deal worth tens of billions of dollars.
In addition to the computing deal, Anthropic’s models will also be made available on Microsoft’s Foundry service for deploying AI models on the cloud. Models like Claude Sonnet have long been a notable absence on Microsoft’s cloud, which offers an array of models from OpenAI, Meta Platforms Inc., DeepSeek and Elon Musk’s xAI. In September, Microsoft announced it would start using models from Anthropic to help power its workplace AI assistant.
Amazon is also a key Anthropic partner. The Seattle-based computing giant has backed the AI startup with an investment of $8 billion and built a massive complex of data centers and custom Amazon Web Services AI chips for Anthropic’s use. Amazon remains Anthropic’s primary cloud provider.
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