NVIDIA, Microsoft and Anthropic have signed a new multi-million dollar agreement

Microsoft, NVIDIA and Anthropic have announced recently a series of strategic alliances that redistribute the map of power in the generative AI race. Anthropic will deploy its Claude models in Azure, Microsoft’s cloud, while committing to purchase $30 billion in computing capacity and contract additional capacity of up to one gigawatt. For their part, NVIDIA and Microsoft will invest up to 10,000 and 5,000 million dollars respectively in the startup.

The triangular pact, in figures. Anthropic will have access for the first time to Microsoft Foundry, where its most advanced models (Claude Sonnet 4.5, Claude Opus 4.1 and Claude Haiku 4.5) will be available to Azure enterprise customers. With this, Claude becomes the only advanced model present in the three main cloud services in the world.

Additionally, Microsoft promise maintain the integration of Claude into its Copilot family, including GitHub Copilot, Microsoft 365 Copilot, and Copilot Studio. In parallel, NVIDIA and Anthropic establish their first collaboration of such caliber. To do this, they will work together in design and engineering to optimize the Claude models on future NVIDIA architectures, starting with systems Grace Blackwell and Vera Rubin.

Microsoft looks for alternatives to OpenAI. This move comes just weeks after OpenAI will complete its restructuring towards a for-profit model and will renew its agreement with Microsoft. Although Microsoft maintains a 27% stake in OpenAI valued at about $135 billion, the new terms of the deal have relaxed some key elements of its exclusivity. And OpenAI can now collaborate with third parties and release open source models, while Microsoft no longer has the right to try to be its sole computing provider.

According to The Vergethese changes in the relationship with OpenAI have precisely allowed Microsoft to close this pact with Anthropic. In fact, Microsoft had already been betting on Claude in some of its services, for example, in Visual Code, prioritizing Claude over GPT-5 in your model selector. It also recently added Claude Sonnet 4 and Claude Opus 4.1 to Microsoft 365 Copilot.

Circular financing: money that comes back. As is customary in these AI macro-agreements, a clear circular financing dynamic. Microsoft and NVIDIA pump capital into Anthropic, which in turn commits to spending tens of billions on infrastructure provided by those same companies. In essence, some of the money invested returns as revenue from cloud computing services and specialized hardware.

It is not a new phenomenon: in fact, Anthropic already has similar agreements with Amazon, which has invested 8 billion dollars and continues to be its main infrastructure provider, and with Google, which in recent weeks announced a pact to provide up to one million TPUs to the startup. These types of cross-investments have become the norm in the generative AI ecosystem, creating almost symbiotic relationships between companies to meet their computing and infrastructure needs.

one gigawatt. Building a data center with that capacity could cost around $50 billion, according to industry estimateswith some 35 billion dedicated exclusively to AI chips. Although the figure pales compared to OpenAI’s Stargate project, which aspires to 500,000 million dollars In investing, Anthropic’s approach seems more pragmatic and execution-focused.

The company led by Dario Amodei has gained ground in the business market with less media noise but with solid results. And its annualized revenue rate now reaches $7 billion, although like the rest of the AI ​​startups it continues to spend much more than it earns.

Diversification. What is really relevant about this agreement is that it confirms a trend: that large technology companies are no longer betting everything on a single card in AI. Microsoft, which has invested billions in OpenAI since 2019 and made it the flagship of its AI strategy, is now expanding its portfolio with Anthropic. For its part, Anthropic demonstrates its ability to maintain multiple alliances without compromising its independence. It is the sensible option and the one that minimizes risks.

Cover image | Microsoft

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