Tech giants pour billions into Anthropic as circular AI investments roll on

Summary

D.A. Davidson analyst Gil Luria told Reuters that the new Anthropic-Microsoft partnership aims to reduce the AI economy’s reliance on OpenAI. “Microsoft has decided not to rely on one frontier model company,” Luria said. “Nvidia was also somewhat dependent on OpenAI’s success and is now helping generating broader demand.” However, the partnership also places further scrutiny on the increasingly circular nature of AI industry investments. “Anthropic will pay Microsoft to pay Nvidia so Microsoft and Nvidia can pay Anthropic,” wrote CNBC tech correspondent Steve Kovach on Bluesky. Under the partnership, Anthropic will work with Nvidia on chips and models to improve performance and commit up to 1 gigawatt of compute using Nvidia’s Grace Blackwell and Vera Rubin hardware. Microsoft will give Azure AI Foundry customers access to the latest Claude models. With this deal, Claude becomes available through all three major cloud providers: Microsoft, Amazon, and Google. Amazon will remain Anthropic’s primary cloud provider and training partner.