Microsoft announced on Tuesday new strategic partnerships with Nvidia and artificial intelligence startup Anthropic, the latest sign that the company is working to reduce its reliance on OpenAI.
As part of the deal, Microsoft will invest up to $5 billion in Anthropic, while Nvidia will invest up to $10 billion in the startup.
These investments brought Anthropic’s valuation to around $350 billion, up from $183 billion in September, according to a source close to the deal. Terms of the company’s next funding round are still being finalized, the source said.
Anthropic has committed to purchasing $30 billion of Azure compute capacity from Microsoft and has contracted for up to one gigawatt of additional compute capacity, according to a blog post. Anthropic has also committed to purchasing up to a gigawatt of computing 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’re going to partner deeply with Anthropic to accelerate Claude.”
Nvidia and Anthropic are collaborating for the first time to “support Anthropic’s future growth,” the blog says. 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 in OpenAI, Anthropic’s rival, backing the company as early as 2019. OpenAI was founded as a nonprofit research lab in 2015, but became one of the fastest-growing commercial entities on the planet in recent years after the launch of its ChatGPT chatbot.
OpenAI completed a recapitalization last month and Microsoft officially presented its partnership with the startup. Microsoft owns a stake in OpenAI’s for-profit business valued at $135 billion, or about 27% of the company on a diluted as-converted basis.
Anthropic was founded by former OpenAI research leaders, including its CEO Dario Amodei, in 2021. Amazon-The supported company is best known for developing a family of large language models called Claude.
Amazon Web Services has been named Anthropic’s primary cloud provider in 2023 and primary education partner in 2024. Amazon will continue to serve in both roles, Anthropic said Tuesday.
“As an industry, we really need to move beyond any kind of zero-sum narrative or hype,” Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said in the video. “What is needed now is hard work to build broad and sustainable 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 great to approach any other way.
Nvidia is expected to report third-quarter results on Wednesday.
