Tech giants have formed another alliance. Microsoft and Nvidia Announced to move towards AI ( Artificial Intelligence ) The startup Anthropic has received funding of up to $15 billion.
On November 18th local time, Nvidia , Microsoft , and Anthropic announced a multi-billion dollar collaboration agreement. Under the agreement, Nvidia will invest up to $10 billion in Anthropic, while Microsoft will invest up to $5 billion. Anthropic has also committed to purchasing $30 billion worth of Azure cloud computing resources . The company plans to purchase up to 1 GW (gigawatt) of additional computing capacity.
This marks the first deep technical partnership between NVIDIA and Anthropic. The two companies will collaborate on design and engineering, optimizing Anthropic's product models while simultaneously refining future NVIDIA architectures to accommodate Anthropic's workloads. Anthropic has committed to using NVIDIA's Grace Blackwell and Vera Rubin systems to achieve up to 1GW of computing capacity.
NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang stated, "This is a dream come true for us. We have always admired the work of Anthropic and CEO Dario, and this will be our first in-depth collaboration with Anthropic to accelerate the development of the Claude model."
For Microsoft, this collaboration expands upon its existing partnership with Anthropic. Customers of Microsoft Foundry, Microsoft's AI platform, will be able to use Anthropic's latest Claude model, making Claude the only model simultaneously available on Microsoft Cloud. Google Cloud and Amazon These are cutting-edge models used on AWS, one of the three major global cloud platforms.
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella stated, "We will become increasingly intertwined as each other's customers. We will adopt Anthropic's model, they will use our infrastructure, and we will jointly expand the market." Nadella added that OpenAI "remains a key partner."
Founded in 2021 by former OpenAI executives, Anthropic positions itself as a "safety-first" AI company. Its Claude series of large language models is considered one of the main competitors to OpenAI's ChatGPT. In September of this year, Anthropic completed a $13 billion funding round, bringing its valuation to $183 billion.
According to sources familiar with the matter, the latest investments from Nvidia and Microsoft have pushed Anthropic's valuation to around $350 billion, with the terms of its next funding round still being finalized. Both Nvidia and Microsoft have pledged to participate in Anthropic's next funding round.
Anthropic has long been an important partner of Amazon and is not heavily reliant on Nvidia chips. In October of this year, Anthropic also announced a partnership with Google to deploy up to one million Google TPU chips to train its AI model, Claude. This expansion plan is worth tens of billions of dollars, with a projected computing capacity of 1 GW (gigawatt) by 2026.
Currently, there are increasingly more "insider deals" among a few tech giants in the AI industry. Jacob Bourne, an analyst at research firm eMarketer, stated, "These investments reflect a consolidation within the AI industry around a few key companies."
Gil Luria, an analyst at research firm DA Davidson, pointed out that the focus of this collaboration is "reducing the entire AI ecosystem's reliance on OpenAI": "Microsoft has decided to no longer depend on a single cutting-edge model company. Previously, Nvidia also relied to some extent on the success of OpenAI, but now it is helping to create broader demand."
In November of this year, after completing its restructuring, OpenAI announced a multi-year strategic partnership agreement with Amazon AWS worth $38 billion. Over the next seven years, the two parties will continue to deepen their cooperation. OpenAI will gain access to Amazon's cloud computing resources, consisting of hundreds of thousands of NVIDIA GPUs, and will have the ability to expand to tens of millions of CPUs.
It is worth noting that the recent massive deals by tech giants have caused concern in the market. Wall Street is worried about whether these AI products can generate enough revenue to justify these high investments. Foreign media have described the alliances and collaborations between several giants as "using funds from their own balance sheets to make investments," and this high-risk "circular financing" is supporting the current AI boom.
On November 18, Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) fell 2.70% to close at $493.79 per share, with a total market capitalization of $3.67 trillion; Nvidia (Nasdaq: NVDA) fell 2.81% to close at $181.36 per share, with a total market capitalization of $4.41 trillion. The companies are scheduled to release their earnings reports after the US stock market closes on November 19 local time.
(Source: The Paper)
