Anthropic on Wednesday announced that it received a fresh round of investments totaling up to $15 billion from Microsoft and Nvidia, increasing the startup’s valuation to $350 billion, up from its $183 billion valuation as of September.
All three companies have forged a partnership involving billions of dollars in investment aimed at accelerating the development of AI models. Under the partnership, Microsoft and Nvidia will invest up to $15 billion in Anthropic, a leading competitor to OpenAI whose models are popular with coders and businesses.
In a video message, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said that OpenAI “remains a critical partner,” while adding that the companies will increasingly be customers of each other. “We will use Anthropic models, they will use our infrastructure, and we’ll go to market together,” Nadella said.
Anthropic said it would purchase $30 billion worth of computing capacity from Microsoft Azure, powered by Nvidia AI systems. Nvidia will also work with Anthropic on design and engineering. “This is a dream come true for us,” Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said in a video on Tuesday. “You know, we’ve admired the work of Anthropic and Dario for a long time, and this is the first time we are going to deeply partner with Anthropic to accelerate Claude.”
Anthropic was founded in 2021 by former OpenAI research executives, including its CEO, Dario Amodei. The Amazon-backed company is best known for developing a family of large language models called Claude. Anthropic’s new model, Claude Sonnet 4.5, is better at following instructions and can autonomously write code for up to 30 hours straight.
Microsoft’s $5 billion investment into Anthropic comes at a time when the tech giant doesn’t want to depend solely on OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT. OpenAI completed a recapitalisation last month, and Microsoft finally made a partnership with the San Francisco-base startup. Microsoft holds a stake in OpenAI’s for-profit business valued at $135 billion, or roughly 27 per cent of the company on an as-converted, diluted basis.
Amazon Web Services (AWS), a competitor to Microsoft’s Azure, continued to be Anthropic’s primary cloud provider in 2023 and its primary training partner in 2024. Anthropic’s models will now also be available on Azure, Microsoft said.
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A web of AI deals
Microsoft and Nvidia’s investments in Anthropic show the circular nature of AI industry financing. The world’s biggest tech companies, no matter how fierce the competition and despite their rivalries and policy disagreements, are increasingly investing in one another. As circular financing grows, one tech company pays money to another as part of a transaction, and then the second company turns around and purchases the first company’s products or services. Without the initial transaction, the second company might not have been able to make the purchase. The funding mechanism typically takes the form of an investment, a loan, a lease, or another financial arrangement.
The trend of circular investments continues to grow as the potential rewards could reach trillions. However, some analysts warn it could also create an AI bubble; if one major tech company were to crash, fears of a global recession and a collapse of the US economy could follow.
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