Advanced Micro Devices announced Wednesday it will invest up to $5 billion in AI startup Anthropic, part of a broader partnership that will see the chipmaker supply massive computing power to the company behind the Claude AI assistant. The deal underscores the escalating race among cloud and chip giants to lock in access to scarce hardware capable of training and running large language models.
Under the agreement, Anthropic will deploy 2 gigawatts of AMD’s Instinct MI450 series GPUs, housed in the company’s Helios rack-scale systems. The first gigawatt of capacity is expected to come online in the first half of next year. AMD CEO Lisa Su described the partnership as a deepening of ties with Anthropic, which has been aggressively expanding its compute footprint amid surging demand for its products. Notably, the deal does not involve AMD issuing warrants to Anthropic—that earlier arrangement was with OpenAI, a separate entity.
Anthropic has been on a spending spree to secure computing power. In April, it signed a multi-billion-dollar agreement with Amazon and a multi-gigawatt compute deal with Google and Broadcom. In May, it agreed to pay SpaceX $1.25 billion per month through 2029 for all capacity at the Colossus 1 data center in Memphis. The company is also in preliminary talks with Meta to lease additional compute. These moves come after Anthropic warned in April that demand for its Claude models had strained its infrastructure, hurting reliability during peak hours.
The startup’s growth has been explosive. Claude Code, its AI coding assistant, has driven revenue to an estimated run rate of roughly $1.5 billion, up from about $1 billion last year. Anthropic closed a funding round at a valuation near $60 billion in May and confidentially filed for an IPO with the SEC in June. The AMD investment, though smaller than some of its other infrastructure deals, gives Anthropic access to a critical alternative to Nvidia’s dominant GPU supply—and gives AMD a high-profile customer as it tries to chip away at its rival’s market share.
Source: CNBC