Microsoft and Nvidia will invest up to $15 billion in AI company Anthropic, developer of the Claude chatbot, regarded as one of the largest independent competitors of OpenAI. The deal strengthens the company’s ties with two of the major players and investors in the field. According to Bloomberg, the investment will be made as part of Anthropic’s next funding round.
Under the terms of the deal, Microsoft’s investment will amount to up to $5 billion, and Nvidia’s up to $10 billion. In line with recent norms in the field, the investment includes Anthropic’s commitment to purchase cloud‑computing services from Microsoft totaling $30 billion. It also signals a deepening of the collaboration between Anthropic and Microsoft — one of the largest early investors in OpenAI. Recently, the relationship between Microsoft and OpenAI has been trending toward a separation, with OpenAI expected to begin using cloud services from other companies.
"We're increasingly going to be customers of each other. We will use Anthropic models, they will use our infrastructure and we'll go to market together," said Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella. “Of course, this adds to our partnership with OpenAI, which remains a critical partner of Microsoft.”
For Nvidia, the deal locks in the use of its technology by another leading company in the field.
"For the first time, NVIDIA and Anthropic are establishing a deep technology partnership to support Anthropic’s future growth," the chip‑giant said in a press release. “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 was founded in 2021 by former OpenAI employees. Its Claude model is considered one of the leading systems in the market and, according to many users, surpasses ChatGPT in numerous capabilities. In September the company completed a fundraising round of $13 billion at a valuation of $183 billion. However, like all players in the arena, it plans massive investments in AI infrastructure, and has committed to invest $50 billion in building data‑centers in Texas, New York and other U.S. locations.
Last month the company announced a deal with Google under which the tech giant is to receive up to one million AI chips worth tens of billions of dollars. These consistent, significant investments obligate the company — like other players in the field — to raise substantial funding on an ongoing basis.