Tech Titans Microsoft and Nvidia boost Anthropic to $350 Billion in latest AI funding surge

In a move that signals the start of a new chapter in the global artificial-intelligence arms race, Anthropic has raised up to US$15 billion in new investments from Microsoft and Nvidia, propelling its valuation to approximately US$350 billion and more than doubling its worth from about US$183 billion only a few months ago.

Microsoft will provide up to US$5 billion in new funding and Nvidia will invest up to US$10 billion in the San Francisco-based start-up, according to multiple reports.
In addition, Anthropic has agreed to spend about US$30 billion on compute capacity from Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform, while also expected to purchase up to one gigawatt of compute power in Nvidia’s Grace Blackwell and Vera Rubin systems.

This marks a strategic shift for Microsoft: the tech company has been a long-standing partner of OpenAI, but this move into Anthropic’s basket indicates a diversification of its artificial intelligence investments. “We will use Anthropic models, they will use our infrastructure, and we’ll go to market together,” Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said in a video address.

For Nvidia, the deal is significant in that it involves a deep tie-up with an artificial intelligence model developer, instead of simply a hardware supplier. “This is a dream come true for us,” Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said in a statement, noting the co-engineering of Anthropic’s models and Nvidia’s architectures to be optimized for Anthropic’s specific workloads.

Anthropic, founded in 2021 by a group of ex-OpenAI researchers that includes CEO Dario Amodei, is developing the “Claude” family of large-language models, and is positioning itself as a direct competitor to OpenAI in the frontier AI space. Amazon Web Services had been Anthropic’s primary cloud provider and training partner until now – and will continue in this role even after the new investments.

A jump in valuation of this magnitude shows the ever-increasing stakes in the generative AI space, the importance of compute infrastructure and the inextricable links between model development, cloud supply and AI hardware. At US$350 billion, Anthropic will be one of the highest-valued privately held companies in the world.

On the other hand, the company’s hyper-accelerated leap raises questions among analysts about the longer-term sustainability of such valuations – and whether the AI sector is beginning to tread into bubble territory. The circularity of some of the deal’s dynamics is another consideration to be made: from investor to customer and supplier and back again.

As final details are still being negotiated, market observers will be watching closely to see how Anthropic deploys the new capital and computing commitments to turn model innovation into commercial revenues and profitability. For Microsoft, Nvidia and Anthropic alike, the bet is an AI-infrastructure arms race – and the stakes could not be higher.