Nvidia and Microsoft invest in Anthropic, valuation to rise to $350 billion
This announcement strikes directly at the heart of struggling ChatGPT-maker OpenAI: two of its most important partners and investors, Microsoft and Nvidia, have closed strategic partnerships with AI-startup Anthropic, which spun off from OpenAI.
Microsoft is contributing up to 5 billion dollars, Nvidia up to 10 billion dollars. The investments catapult Anthropic’s valuation into the 350 billion dollar range, reports CNBC. That’s a massive jump from the 183 billion dollar valuation in September. The terms of the next funding round are still being finalized, but the dimensions already show the enormous sums moving through the AI sector.
In return, Anthropic has committed to purchasing Azure compute capacity worth 30 billion dollars from Microsoft and contracting additional compute capacity of up to one gigawatt. With Nvidia, the startup is also ordering up to one gigawatt of computing power using Grace Blackwell and Vera Rubin systems. The partnership enables deep technical collaboration between Nvidia and Anthropic for the first time. The companies want to work together on design and engineering to optimize Anthropic’s models for performance and efficiency, and to align future Nvidia architectures with Anthropic workloads.
Microsoft diversifies its AI portfolio
The partnership underscores Microsoft’s strategy to reduce its dependence on OpenAI, after OpenAI has courted Microsoft competitors like Oracle and others. Microsoft has invested billions in OpenAI since 2019 and holds a stake in the for-profit business following the recapitalization in October, valued at 135 billion dollars—roughly 27 percent of the company on a fully diluted basis.
With Anthropic, Microsoft now taps into a second top-tier AI source. Customers of Microsoft Foundry gain access to Anthropic’s frontier models Claude Sonnet 4.5, Claude Opus 4.1, and Claude Haiku 4.5. Claude remains available through Microsoft’s Copilot family, including GitHub Copilot, Microsoft 365 Copilot, and Copilot Studio.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang commented on the partnership enthusiastically: “This is a dream come true for us. You know, we’ve admired the work of Anthropic and Dario for a long time, and this is the first time we’ll be working deeply with Anthropic to accelerate Claude.” The collaboration marks a turning point for Nvidia, which has primarily acted as a hardware supplier and is now directly involved in model development.
Anthropic navigates between tech giants
Anthropic was founded in 2021 by former OpenAI executives, including CEO Dario Amodei. The company develops the Claude family of large language models and has established itself as a serious competitor to OpenAI. Amazon Web Services remains Anthropic’s primary cloud provider and training partner despite the new partnerships—a role AWS has held since 2023. The ability to cooperate simultaneously with Amazon, Microsoft, and Nvidia gives Anthropic strategic flexibility in the fiercely competitive AI market.
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella emphasized the necessity of cooperation in his statement: “As an industry, we really need to move beyond any kind of zero-sum narrative or winner-take-all hype. What’s required now is the hard work of building broad, lasting capabilities together, so this technology can deliver real, tangible local success for every country, every sector, and every customer. The opportunity is simply too big to approach it any other way.” Nvidia will announce its quarterly results on Wednesday—the partnership should generate additional attention there.
