Microsoft on Tuesday announced new strategic partnerships with Nvidia and the artificial intelligence startup Anthropic, the latest sign that the company is working to reduce its dependence on OpenAI.
As part of the agreement, Microsoft will invest up to $5 billion into Anthropic, while Nvidia will invest up to $10 billion into the startup.
The investments have pushed Anthropic’s valuation to the range of $350 billion, up from its $183 billion valuation as of September, according to a source close to the deal who asked not to be named because the details are confidential. The terms of the company’s next round are still being finalized, the person said.
Anthropic has committed to purchasing $30 billion of Azure compute capacity from Microsoft and has contracted for additional compute capacity up to 1 gigawatt, according to a blog post. Anthropic has also committed to purchase up to 1 gigawatt of compute capacity with Nvidia’s Grace Blackwell and Vera Rubin systems.
“This is a dream come true for us,” Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said in a video on Tuesday. “You know, we’ve admired the work of Anthropic and Dario for a long time, and this is the first time we are going to deeply partner with Anthropic to accelerate Claude.”
Nvidia and Anthropic are collaborating to “support Anthropic’s future growth” for the first time, the blog post said. The companies will work together on engineering and design to optimize Anthropic’s models for performance and efficiency, and optimize Nvidia architectures for Anthropic’s specific workloads.
Microsoft has invested billions of dollars into Anthropic’s rival OpenAI, backing the company as early as 2019. OpenAI was founded as a nonprofit research lab in 2015, but has become one of the fastest-growing commercial entities on the planet in recent years following the launch of its ChatGPT chatbot.
OpenAI completed a recapitalization last month, and Microsoft formally outlined its partnership with the startup. Microsoft holds an stake in OpenAI’s for-profit business that is valued at $135 billion, or roughly 27% of the company on an as-converted diluted basis.
Anthropic was founded by former OpenAI research executives, including its CEO Dario Amodei, in 2021. The Amazon-backed company is best known for developing a family of large language models called Claude.
Amazon Web Services was named Anthropic’s primary cloud provider in 2023 and its primary training partner in 2024. Amazon will continue to serve in both of those roles, Anthropic said Tuesday.
“As an industry, we really need to move beyond any type of zero sum narrative or winner take all hype,” Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said in the video. “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.”
Nvidia is scheduled to report third-quarter earnings on Wednesday.
