Nvidia and Microsoft Invest $15 Billion in AI Startup Anthropic

(Patria) - Nvidia and Microsoft have announced a total investment of fifteen billion dollars in the artificial intelligence (AI) startup Anthropic, creator of the Claude chatbot, amid a frenzied spending on technology and growing fears of a bubble, AFP reported.

The major artificial intelligence chip maker, Nvidia, committed ten billion dollars, while Microsoft, which owns 27 percent of Anthropic's competitor OpenAI, pledged up to five billion dollars to the maker of the Claude AI model.

Microsoft is also continuing to invest heavily in its own Copilot AI, which runs on the company's Azure platform.

The deal was part of a comprehensive agreement under which Anthropic committed to purchasing thirty billion dollars worth of Microsoft's cloud computing capacity and adopting the latest versions of Nvidia's chip technology.

"We will increasingly be customers of each other," said Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella in an online video announcing the deal.

"We will use Anthropic models. They will use our infrastructure, and we will go to market together to help our customers understand the value of artificial intelligence."

The investments mark a significant shift in the generative artificial intelligence sector, where competition has intensified between OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, and rivals including Anthropic, as well as Google, which announced its latest Gemini model on Tuesday.

California-based Anthropic was launched in 2021 by former OpenAI employees and positions itself as a company that prioritizes safety in AI development. Their flagship product is the Claude chatbot and family of models.

Technology industry rivals, including Amazon, Meta, and Elon Musk's xAI, have invested tens of billions of dollars in AI since the launch of the first version of ChatGPT in late 2022, when it achieved blockbuster success.

Meanwhile, Nvidia has become a sought-after source of high-performance GPUs tailored for generative AI. With increasing talk among Wall Street analysts about an AI bubble, Nvidia's shares, the world's largest company by market capitalization, have fallen slightly amid a broad sell-off in the tech sector.

Microsoft shares fell by about 2.5 percent.

Sources told CNBC that the new investment valued Anthropic at $350 billion, making it one of the most valuable companies in the world. OpenAI was recently valued at $500 billion.

Investment Frenzy

The massive investment in Anthropic comes a month after Nvidia announced it would invest up to $100 billion in OpenAI, building infrastructure for future generations of technology.

"Computing infrastructure will be the foundation of the economy of the future," OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said at the time.

In a dizzying series of deals, OpenAI also recently signed a $38 billion deal with Amazon's cloud computing division AWS, continuing a string of major partnerships that included Oracle, Broadcom, and AMD.

Nvidia's GPUs, originally designed for gaming systems, have become the fundamental building blocks of artificial intelligence applications, and tech giants are scrambling to secure them for their data centers and AI projects.

Silicon Valley-based Nvidia also recently announced it would invest five billion dollars in chip competitor Intel, which has been struggling with issues.
The investment, supported by the White House, represents a significant commitment to Intel's turnaround efforts, AFP reports.