Anthropic will buy $30 billion worth of Microsoft's facilities and get investments from it and Nvidia

Microsoft, artificial intelligence processor maker Nvidia and AI startup Anthropic, which is developing chatbot Claude, announced a strategic partnership on Nov. 18.

As part of the agreement, Microsoft will invest up to $5 billion in Anthropic and Nvidia will invest up to $10 billion, with Anthropic committing to purchase $30 billion worth of Azure cloud computing capacity from Microsoft and additionally reserving up to one gigawatt of computing capacity.

The agreements were another sign that Microsoft is looking to reduce its dependence on OpenAI, the developer of chatbot ChatGPT, CNBC notes. The tech giant now uses OpenAI's technology in its AI assistant Copilot+. Microsoft is also one of the largest investors in OpenAI: it owns a 27% stake in the commercial organization OpenAI Group PBC, the value of which is estimated at $135 billion.

On November 6, Business Insider reported that Google is negotiating a new round of investment in Anthropic, which could value the company at more than $350 billion. Google has already invested more than $3 billion in the Claude developer and now owns 14% of Anthropic, the publication noted.

In late October, marketplace and cloud service provider Amazon said it had leased 1 million of its custom AI chips to Anthropic. At that point, Anthropic had already leased 500,000 specialized Amazon Trainium2 AI chips to run Claude's models as part of Project Rainier, a large-scale AI cluster spanning data centers in Mississippi and Indiana. Such clusters combine thousands of specialized chips on servers and sometimes between data centers so they can work as a single system to train and run AI models.

This article was AI-translated and verified by a human editor