Biggest AI deal yet? OpenAI rival Anthropic bags $15 billion investment from Microsoft, Nvidia

Anthropic, the creator of Claude and a fast-rising rival to OpenAI, has secured up to $15 billion in new investments from Microsoft and Nvidia as part of a sweeping AI infrastructure partnership announced ahead of Microsoft’s Ignite 2025 developer conference.

The combined deal with Anthropic’s massive $30 billion commitment to purchase Azure compute marks one of the largest funding and cloud-capacity arrangements ever in the artificial intelligence sector.

Microsoft deepens shift beyond OpenAI

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Microsoft said Tuesday it is entering a new strategic partnership with Anthropic and Nvidia, signalling a further move away from its once-exclusive alignment with OpenAI. Anthropic has committed to buying $30 billion worth of Azure cloud capacity, while Nvidia will invest up to $10 billion and Microsoft up to $5 billion in the San Francisco-based startup.

“This is all about deepening our commitment to bringing the best infrastructure, model choice and applications to our customers,” Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said, adding that the deal still builds on the “critical” partnership the company maintains with OpenAI.

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Microsoft had been the exclusive cloud provider for OpenAI until earlier this year, but that relationship has loosened as OpenAI pursued additional compute partnerships with Oracle, SoftBank and others. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said in September that the company was “severely limited for the value we can offer to people” under earlier compute constraints.

Anthropic, founded in 2021 by former OpenAI leaders, said Claude will now be the “only frontier model” available across the three leading cloud platforms: Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure. At Ignite, Anthropic chief product officer Mike Krieger said, “From the beginning, it has seemed there has been a lot of shared DNA between our companies.”

Despite its diversification, Microsoft still holds roughly a 27 per cent stake in OpenAI’s new for-profit entity.

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Nvidia partnership unlocks a gigawatt of compute

As part of the new agreement, Anthropic will gain access to up to a gigawatt of computing capacity powered by Nvidia’s advanced AI chips. Nvidia founder and CEO Jensen Huang said he has “admired the work of Anthropic and Dario for a long time,” emphasising that this is the first time Nvidia will “deeply partner with Anthropic to accelerate Claude.”

Anthropic and Nvidia will collaborate on co-optimising Claude models for Nvidia’s current and future architectures, including the Grace Blackwell and Vera Rubin systems.

Microsoft and Anthropic are also expanding their product integrations. Businesses using Microsoft Foundry will gain access to Anthropic’s frontier Claude models — including Claude Opus 4.1, Sonnet 4.5 and Haiku 4.5. Microsoft will also continue offering Claude across its Copilot ecosystem, including GitHub Copilot, Microsoft 365 Copilot and Copilot Studio.

Executives from all three companies said the partnership aims to deliver higher performance, stronger cost efficiencies and broader access to cutting-edge AI models for enterprises worldwide.