Anthropic is now valued at around $350 billion, up from its $183 billion valuation as of September, after Microsoft and Nvidia jointly invested $15 billion in the AI startup, CNBC reported.
Microsoft announced this strategic partnership with Nvidia and Anthropic on Tuesday, signalling a fresh push to diversify its AI needs and reduce its reliance on ChatGPT-maker OpenAI.
As part of the agreement, Microsoft will invest up to $5 billion in Anthropic, while Nvidia will invest up to $10 billion in the Artificial Intelligence startup. The terms of the company’s next round are still being finalised, CNBC said in a news report.
Anthropic’s commitments
Anthropic has agreed to purchase $30 billion worth of Azure compute capacity from Microsoft and has contracted for additional compute capacity up to 1 gigawatt, according to the Official Microsoft Blog.
Simultaneously, it has also committed to buy up to 1 gigawatt of compute 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 shared with the Official Microsoft Blog on Tuesday. “You know, we’ve admired the work of Anthropic and Dario for a long time, and this is the first time we are going to deeply partner with Anthropic to accelerate Claude.”
The video included Anthropic co-founder and CEO Dario Amodei, Microsoft Chairman and CEO Satya Nadella, and NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang, gathered to discuss the new partnerships.
Nvidia and Anthropic are working together to “support Anthropic’s future growth” for the first time, the blog post said. The companies will collaborate on engineering and design to boost the performance and efficiency of Anthropic’s models, while optimising Nvidia architectures to meet Anthropic’s specific workloads.
Microsoft’s backing of OpenAI
Satya Nadella-led Microsoft has invested billions of dollars in Anthropic’s rival, OpenAI, since 2019. Founded as a nonprofit research lab in 2015, OpenAI has evolved into one of the world’s fastest-growing commercial AI companies, driven by the breakout success of its ChatGPT chatbot.
Just last month, OpenAI completed a recapitalisation, along with Microsoft formally outlining its partnership with the startup. Microsoft holds a stake in OpenAI’s for-profit business, valued at $135 billion, or roughly 27% of the company on an as-converted, diluted basis.
“As an industry, we really need to move beyond any type of zero-sum narrative or winner-take-all hype,” Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said in the video. “What’s required now is the hard work of building broad, durable 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 big to approach any other way,” he added.
About Anthropic
The AI startup was founded by former OpenAI research executives, including its CEO, Dario Amodei, in 2021. The Amazon-backed company’s most popular offering is a family of large language models called Claude.
Amazon Web Services was named Anthropic’s primary cloud provider in 2023 and its primary training partner in 2024. Even after the fresh round of investments, Amazon will continue to serve in both of those roles, Anthropic said on Tuesday.
