AMD to sell Anthropic tens of billions in AI servers, invest up to $5bn in startup

Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) will sell Anthropic tens of billions of dollars’ worth of AI servers and invest as much as $5bn in the Claude maker, in a deal that would strengthen its foothold in a market dominated by rival Nvidia.

The announcement on Wednesday marks the latest so-called circular deal in the AI industry, where chipmakers invest in AI firms that are among their biggest customers. Nvidia has been in talks to invest $30bn in ChatGPT creator OpenAI.

Buying AMD chips would secure Anthropic much-needed AI computing capacity. The startup has emerged as one of the leaders in Silicon Valley’s artificial intelligence race, thanks to strong adoption of its enterprise tools such as Claude Code.

Anthropic will buy up to two gigawatts of AMD’s latest-generation Instinct MI450 chips, starting in the first half of 2027, the companies said. AMD’s investment in Anthropic will be tied achieving certain deployment milestones.

AMD executives have said 1 gigawatt of computing power, enough to power roughly 750,000 US homes, can cost double-digit billions of dollars.

Shares of the Santa Clara, California-based company ticked up 0.5 per cent in early trading. The stock has more than doubled in value so far this year.

In October, AMD announced a multi-year deal with OpenAI that would also bring in tens of billions of dollars in annual revenue while giving the ChatGPT creator the option to buy up to roughly 10pc of the chipmaker.

Anthropic needs computing capacity

“Access to compute is central to keeping Claude at the frontier and meeting demand from our customers,” Tom Brown, co-founder and compute head at Anthropic, said on Wednesday.

The startup has moved aggressively in recent months to overcome capacity constraints for its services. It agreed in May to rent the full computing power of SpaceX’s Colossus 1 facility in Memphis, which houses more than 220,000 Nvidia processors and gave it 300 megawatts of new capacity.

Meta Platforms is also in talks to lease computing power to Anthropic in a potential deal worth up to $10bn over two years, a source familiar with the matter said last week.

Under the latest deal, Anthropic would use some of the AMD chips at its own data centres and lease additional capacity through cloud providers and new AI cloud companies, according to The Wall Street Journal, which first reported the news.

AMD was in talks to provide a financial backstop for Anthropic’s future data centre leases, the report said. ...