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One of the biggest headlines right now in AI has to do with a company that has scaled impressively over the last couple of years, becoming a household name for its agentic models, and even going toe-to-toe with one of its biggest U.S. government clients over AI safety concerns.
From its humble beginnings as the product of a couple of twins, formerly employed by OpenAI, Anthropic has mushroomed into a market force to be recognized. Two years ago, the company was valued between $4 billion and $15 billion: now, it’s estimated to be worth over $350 billion, and everyone knows who Claude is.
So it’s making news that Anthropic is making a big play in using Microsoft compute for its operations, to the tune of $30 billion in Azure infrastructure services.
“Anthropic is in talks to rent servers powered by Microsoft-designed AI server chips, a coup for the software giant,” report Aaron Holmes and Qianer Lu for The Information.
One question you might ask is, why wouldn’t Anthropic, in its expansion push, just use Nvidia hardware in-house like so many other companies?
I asked GPT, and this is what I came up with (I’m paraphrasing);
Number four is interesting, in that I wonder whether that was part of the strategy at all. Elsewhere on the web, Ashley Capoot and MacKenzie Sigalos at CNBC report that while Microsoft plans to invest up to $5 billion into Anthropic, Nvidia will invest double that, up to $10 billion.
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“Anthropic has also committed to purchase up to 1 gigawatt of compute capacity with Nvidia’s Grace Blackwell and Vera Rubin systems,” Capoot and Sigalos write. So, if both of these contracts are moving forward, maybe negotiation is part of the equation.
The agreement between Anthropic and Microsoft takes place in a particular context, where we often see AI companies joining forces to move the ball forward. For example, Anthropic has also inked deals with Amazon, which has invested billions in the company, while Anthropic uses AWS infrastructure and Amazon Trainium chips alongside NVIDIA hardware. Google has invested heavily in Anthropic, too, and provides cloud compute through Google Cloud. All of this paints a picture of a firm that rose to the top with broad backing from some of the biggest blue chips, and enjoys quite a range of vendor provisions.
Microsoft, for its part, uses Nvidia hardware internally. Apple uses OpenAI models for Apple Intelligence features and Siri escalation flows. And the list goes on…
In the race to the top of the AI mountain, companies aren’t just making deals amongst each other. They’re looking for the talent to scale, and the leadership to accomplish the trajectories that sustain corporate development. That said, Anthropic is also making headlines for “poaching” none other than Andrej Karpathy, the father of vibecoding, who told us that “English is the new programming language.” The news is that Karpathy will head an AI division in the Amodei kingdom.
What does all of this mean? Unlike the usual flurry of mergers and acquisitions and strategic partnerships that you see elsewhere in the business world, this isn’t just horse trading: it shows how the technologies that are changing our lives are supported in markets, and in the places where development happens. Stay tuned for more.
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