Nvidia and Microsoft are investing $15 billion. in Anthropic. In return, the start-up will buy computing power
Under the agreement, Microsoft and Nvidia will invest jointly up to USD 15 billion at Anthropic, one of OpenAI's most important competitorswhose Claude models are gaining popularity among developers and companies.
In return, Anthropic agreed to purchase computing power in the Microsoft Azure cloud worth USD 30 billion, based on Nvidia's AI systems. The chipmaker is also expected to work closely with the startup on the design and engineering of IT infrastructure.
In practice, this is a gigantic financial and technological injection for Anthropic and a guarantee of long-term demand for Nvidia hardware and Microsoft cloud services.
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Anthropic and alliance despite conflicting interests
The new agreement is surprising because the network of connections between these companies is already very dense (and not free from tensions). Microsoft is the largest investor in OpenAI, Anthropic's direct rival, and makes its models available to customers in Azure. At the same time, it is building its own Microsoft AI organization, which is to lead the company to greater technological independence and independence from OpenAI after 2032.when your current model license agreement expires.
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In turn, Dario Amodei, co-founder and head of Anthropic, has repeatedly clashed publicly with Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia. Amodei criticized, among others, willingness to export advanced AI chips to China and the Middle East, pointing to risks to national security and the West's technological advantage. He also warned about the large scale of potential layoffs among office workers under the influence of AI automation, which Huang questioned.
Despite these disputes, when announcing the partnership, both managers spoke about each other in a very friendly tone. Amodei emphasized that without Nvidia there would be no current AI boom, and Huang complimented Claude's models, saying that Nvidia developers love them. The public turn from harsh words to mutual praise clearly shows how much is at stake and how much each side needs the other.
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For Microsoft, the agreement with Anthropic is a logical extension of its multi-partner platform strategy. Satya Nadella, the head of the company, emphasizes that Microsoft wants to be a place where customers have a choice of models – from OpenAI, through Anthropic, to Microsoft's own models – but all these solutions use the same infrastructure, i.e. the Azure cloud with hundreds of thousands of Nvidia graphics processors.
As part of the agreement, Anthropic agreed to initially purchase up to 1 gigawatt of computing power in Azure. This power is to be based on the latest Nvidia servers with Grace Blackwell processors and on Vera Rubin systems that are yet to enter the market. If the volume is $30 billion is not enough to achieve the declared capacity of 1 GW, Anthropic may increase its expenses.
Claude models will be more widely available in Azure, and Microsoft is already using Anthropic solutions in its own 365 family tools. Today, it is important for model creators to reach customers of the largest clouds – Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud, because that is where the fight for the adoption of generative tools by business takes place.
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Bubble risk and self-financing
Investments on this scale strengthen the discussion about whether the AI sector is falling into a bubble. In the short term, the first signs of nervousness are already visible. Shares of Microsoft and Nvidia fell by almost 3% on the day the agreement was announced, amid a generally weaker market session.
Some analysts draw attention to the phenomenon of circular financing, which we wrote about on Business Insider. Chipmakers like Nvidia and Advanced Micro Devices invest from their own balance sheets in AI startups, which then use that money… to buy massive amounts of hardware from them. From the investors' point of view, this raises the question whether the revenues from such contracts are firm enough and based on actual demand end customers, or rather create a short-term boom effect.
The parallel movements of other giants only heat up the atmosphere. On the day the alliance was announced, there was also information about the premiere of Gemini 3 – the next version of the Google model. In the background are further multi-billion investments in OpenAI and the race to build the largest, most advanced data centers in the world.
