Big AI companies and the people that supply big AI companies are once again investing billions of dollars in one another: this time, Nvidia, Microsoft and Anthropic
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A LOT of money is being thrown around in the AI sphere. The latest of these multi-trillion dollar deals comes to us in the form of a new strategic partnership between Nvidia, Microsoft, and Claude creator Anthropic.
Nvidia announced the deal on Tuesday, with its two partners making their own announcements simultaneously. Nvidia’s post explains that as ChatGPT competitor Claude is being scaled up using Microsoft Azure—which itself uses Nvidia’s hardware—it made sense for the three companies to enter into a more formal relationship.
Hence, Anthropic is committing to buy up $30 billion worth of Azure compute capacity, while Microsoft has agreed to invest $5 billion back into Anthropic, and Nvidia will also offer up $10 billion to Claude’s creator. It’s almost more money than my bog-standard grey matter wants to compute.
But back to silicon—Nvidia says it will also collaborate with Anthropic at a technical level. The company says the pair will co-ordinate “on design and engineering, with the goal of optimizing Anthropic models for the best possible performance, efficiency and TCO, and optimizing future NVIDIA architectures for Anthropic workloads.”
Anthropic has committed to 1 gigawatt of compute capacity initially, with Nvidia hoping deployment of its Grace Blackwell and Vera Rubin systems will help the AI company easily reach that threshold.
As for Microsoft, it’s obviously still going hard on AI. For a start, Microsoft Foundry is getting even more models in the form of Claude Sonnet 4.5, Claude Opus 4.1, and Claude Haiku 4.5. Not only that, but apparently, “Microsoft has also committed to continuing access for Claude across Microsoft’s Copilot family, including GitHub Copilot, Microsoft 365 Copilot, and Copilot Studio.”
Add to that the fact Nvidia is currently enjoying a $5 trillion valuation thanks to the AI industry’s reliance on its hardware, or the fact that Anthropic competitor OpenAI is valued at $500 billion, and it may sound like the good times are well and truly rolling. However, I’ve been hearing rumblings of an AI bubble for some time now, with one market analyst estimating that it’s 17 times bigger than the dotcom goldrush, and four times larger than the subprime bubble that caused the 2008 crash.
But that’s just one market analyst, right? Well, that’s alongside one of the world’s top bankers saying he’s “far more worried than others” about whether the AI bubble will burst. Okay, but it’s not like the CEO of Google is doomsaying about it—oh, wait, what? He said that, in the event of an AI bubble burst, “No company is going to be immune, including us.”
And that was all after OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said “Someone is going to lose a phenomenal amount of money” due to ill-advised AI over-investment? Yeah, it really sounds like big tech is feeling the heat about something—just not enough to stop flinging billions of dollars at each other.
