Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) has announced a significant deal with AI startup Anthropic, involving both an investment and a substantial chip sale. AMD will invest up to $5 billion in Anthropic, an investment tied to the achievement of certain deployment milestones. Simultaneously, Anthropic will purchase up to two gigawatts of AMD's latest-generation Instinct MI450 chips, with the deployment of the first gigawatt scheduled to begin in the first half of 2027. This partnership aims to strengthen AMD's position in the AI chip market, which is currently dominated by Nvidia.
The deal underscores Anthropic's aggressive efforts to secure necessary AI computing capacity amidst rapid growth and high demand for its services, such as Claude Code. One gigawatt of computing power in the AI sector can cost in the double-digit billions of dollars. Anthropic plans to utilize some of these AMD chips in its own data centers and lease additional capacity through cloud providers and emerging AI cloud companies. The companies also announced a multi-year engineering collaboration, where AMD will use Claude to optimize workloads for AMD Instinct GPUs and accelerate ROCm software development, and will generally adopt Claude across its engineering and product development teams.
This agreement represents the latest in a series of "circular deals" within the AI industry, where chip manufacturers invest in AI firms that are also their major customers. For example, Nvidia is reportedly in discussions to invest $30 billion in OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT. AMD itself had previously announced a multi-year deal with OpenAI in October, potentially generating tens of billions of dollars in annual revenue and offering OpenAI an option to acquire up to 10% of the chipmaker. The deal also follows Anthropic's moves to overcome capacity constraints, including renting the full computing power of SpaceX's Colossus 1 facility, which houses over 220,000 Nvidia processors and provides 300 megawatts of new capacity. Meta Platforms is also reportedly in talks to lease computing power to Anthropic in a potential deal worth up to $10 billion over two years.
