Another day, another landmark infrastructure deal between some of the world's largest tech companies. This time, it's Claude developer, Anthropic, which has struck a new partnership with Microsoft and Nvidia, as per the company's official blog. Anthropic will now use Microsoft's Azure servers to run Claude, purchasing $30 billion worth of server compute capacity over the coming years, with a pledge to help develop an additional gigawatt of compute using Nvidia Blackwell and Vera Rubin GPUs.
This deal will also see Nvidia and Anthropic work closely together to optimize future Nvidia architectures for better Claude performance and efficiency, and Anthropic models for Nvidia hardware.
Getting Claude on Azure also makes it more widely available. Various Claude models will be available to Microsoft Foundry customers, making it easier for businesses to access Anthropic AI. It will also be accessible through Copilot in GitHub, Copilot Studio, and Microsoft 365.
Although this is a big win for all the companies involved, it's arguably Anthropic's big coming-out party. It's now the only major AI developer where Claude runs on all the big-three cloud platforms - Azure, AWS, and Google Cloud. The companies are also becoming ever more intertwined, with Microsoft and Nvidia jointly investing $15 billion in Anthropic.
In the wake of the deal's announcement, Anthropic's valuation is now thought to be around $350 billion, close to double its September valuation of $183 billion.
This further circularizes the AI industry, making all these companies even more interdependent. It's not that the industry is too big to fail; it's the threat that if any of them do, they might take all of the others with them.
Hedging all the bets
Microsoft was an early investor in Anthropic rival and ChatGPT developer, OpenAI, and it doubled down on that earlier this year when it restructured its working relationship deal with OpenAI, taking an ownership stake while retaining access to its model data. Now, it's heavily invested in Anthropic and its Claude AI platform, which competes directly with OpenAI.
Although that might create conflicts of interest, Microsoft seems keen to back every horse it can, so that whoever ends up making the best models, Microsoft is there to take advantage regardless.
In that, it has a clear partner in Nvidia. Although Nvidia isn't quite as directly invested in AI transforming Windows 11, it does want the AI demand to continue apace. At this time, Nvidia is arguably one of the few companies that has directly earned any material profit from AI. Everyone else is spending, investing, and building out the infrastructure they claim they need, not to be left behind by the competition.
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