Credit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bl7vHnOgEg0&t=4s

On Tuesday, Microsoft and Nvidia announced plans to invest in Anthropic under a new partnership that includes a $30 billion commitment by the Claude maker to use Microsoft’s cloud services. Nvidia will commit up to $10 billion to Anthropic and Microsoft up to $5 billion, with both companies investing in Anthropic’s next funding round.

The deal brings together two companies that have backed OpenAI and connects them more closely to one of the ChatGPT maker’s main competitors. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said in a video that OpenAI “remains a critical partner,” while adding that the companies will increasingly be customers of each other.

“We will use Anthropic models, they will use our infrastructure, and we’ll go to market together,” Nadella said.

The move follows OpenAI’s recent restructuring that gave the company greater distance from its non-profit origins. OpenAI has since announced a $38 billion deal to buy cloud services from Amazon.com as the company becomes less dependent on Microsoft. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has said the company plans to spend $1.4 trillion to develop 30 gigawatts of computing resources.

D.A. Davidson analyst Gil Luria told Reuters that the new Anthropic-Microsoft partnership aims to reduce the AI economy’s reliance on OpenAI. “Microsoft has decided not to rely on one frontier model company,” Luria said. “Nvidia was also somewhat dependent on OpenAI’s success and is now helping generating broader demand.”

However, the partnership also places further scrutiny on the increasingly circular nature of AI industry investments. “Anthropic will pay Microsoft to pay Nvidia so Microsoft and Nvidia can pay Anthropic,” wrote CNBC tech correspondent Steve Kovach on Bluesky.

Under the partnership, Anthropic will work with Nvidia on chips and models to improve performance and commit up to 1 gigawatt of compute using Nvidia’s Grace Blackwell and Vera Rubin hardware.

Microsoft will give Azure AI Foundry customers access to the latest Claude models. With this deal, Claude becomes available through all three major cloud providers: Microsoft, Amazon, and Google. Amazon will remain Anthropic’s primary cloud provider and training partner.