AMD to invest up to $5 billion in Anthropic in AI chip pact

AMD (NASDAQ: AMD) said on Wednesday that it will invest as much as $5 billion in Anthropic. The investment involves a multi-year agreement under which Anthropic will use up to 2 gigawatts’ worth of AMD’s Instinct MI450 chips. 

The deal connects AMD with Anthropic, one of the industry’s largest chip buyers, at a moment when gaining access to advanced chips is notably difficult. 

Why did AMD invest in Anthropic?

Advanced Micro Devices (NASDAQ: AMD) has announced that it will take a strategic equity stake worth as much as $5 billion in Anthropic. Following the investment, Anthropic will be tied to a multi-year agreement under which it will run up to 2 gigawatts of AMD’s Instinct MI450 Series GPUs. 

For AMD, which has been attempting to narrow Nvidia’s dominance of the market, the deal with Anthropic brings it one step closer to its goal. The company has also struck deals with OpenAI and Meta (NASDAQ: META) in recent months. 

Following the deal announcement, AMD stock climbed 8.11% to $544.43. The Wall Street Journal put the value of the AI servers involved in the deal at “tens of billions of dollars.”

Deployment kicks off in the first half of 2027, with the first gigawatt coming online then. The hardware sits inside AMD’s Helios rack systems, which pair Instinct MI455X GPUs with the company’s EPYC “Venice” CPUs, Pensando networking gear and its ROCm software stack. The two firms are jointly scouting locations to house the chips. 

For Anthropic, the deal secures its access to critical computing capacity. The company currently runs its heavy training and inference workloads with Google’s (NASDAQ: GOOGL) Tensor Processing Units, Amazon’s (NASDAQ: AMZN) Trainium chips, and Nvidia’s GPUs. 

“Access to compute is central to keeping Claude at the frontier and meeting demand from our customers.” Tom Brown, the co-founder and chief compute officer of Anthropic, stated.

How will Anthropic pay for the chips and what’s AMD’s role?

Anthropic plans to buy some AMD chips outright for data centers it controls, while leasing the rest through cloud providers and so-called neoclouds. 

AMD is also reportedly considering guaranteeing Anthropic’s future data-center lease payments, meaning that the chipmaker will take on more financial risk for its own customer. 

Other large tech companies with strong credit ratings have also been discussing backing leases or debt for AI startups that otherwise wouldn’t be able to raise money on good terms by themselves. For example, Google has already agreed to guarantee some data-center deals so Anthropic could use its TPU chips.

Anthropic and AMD also agreed to work together on engineering. Anthropic’s Claude models will be used to tune workloads for AMD’s Instinct GPUs and to speed up development of ROCm, the open software layer AMD offers as an alternative to Nvidia’s CUDA. AMD has said that it will put Claude to work across its engineering and product teams. 

Anthropic already runs on AMD’s earlier Instinct MI355X chips and recently closed $65 billion in Series H funding at a $965 billion post-money valuation. 

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