Microsoft, Nvidia, and Anthropic: Billion-Dollar Deal for AI

In conjunction with the Microsoft Ignite sales fair, the corporation not only announced that it would equip Windows and its ecosystem with more agentic AI but also, together with Nvidia, invest billions in OpenAI competitor Anthropic. The chip developer Nvidia is investing up to ten billion US dollars, and Microsoft up to five billion. Anthropic's valuation is almost doubling.

Anthropic moves into Microsoft's Copilot

Through the deepened partnership, Anthropic is also forging closer ties with the two corporations. The AI company commits to purchasing computing power from Microsoft's Azure cloud worth 30 billion dollars for the expansion of its Claude model and to acquire additional computing capacity of up to one gigawatt. The underlying infrastructure is to run on Nvidia hardware. According to the joint announcement, Anthropic will rely on Nvidia's Grace Blackwell and Vera Rubin systems.

The goal is to enable more companies to use Claude, especially via Azure, with more choice of models and some Claude-specific functions that integrate into Microsoft's offering. Customers of Microsoft Foundry will gain access to the Claude models Sonnet 4.5, Opus 4.1, and Haiku 4.5 through the new partnership. As part of the deal, Microsoft has committed to offering access to Claude across the entire Copilot product family, including GitHub Copilot, Microsoft 365 Copilot, and Copilot Studio.

The companies proudly announce that through the partnership, Claude will be “the only 'frontier model' available on all three of the world's leading cloud services.” Despite the billion-dollar announcement and the associated expansion of its cloud presence to other managed services, Anthropic maintains in its self-published and largely contentually identical press release that Amazon “remains Anthropic's most important cloud provider and training partner.”

Even though Microsoft is investing in Anthropic and integrating it into its services, OpenAI remains a central partner, said Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella. After all, Microsoft holds a 27 percent stake in OpenAI, and the two companies had also agreed on new partnership rules at the end of October, which are intended to grant them more freedom. However, there were some disputes regarding the contract terms beforehand.

Anthropic's value almost doubled since September

According to a report by the US business channel CNBC, the new deal values Anthropic at around 350 billion dollars. In September, the company was valued at 183 billion dollars. Thus, the company's value has almost doubled in two months.

Many voices see the massive investments in AI infrastructure as a bubble on the verge of bursting. Even OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, those who themselves profit significantly from the triumph of AI, consider this possible. However, they speak, not entirely unselfishly, of the possible bursting of the bubble. Zuckerberg, for example, would then buy startups and expertise cheaply. Until then, however, the companies are apparently throwing billions at each other. These diverse circular transactions and hardly transparent connections are subject to criticism.

(afl)