Microsoft partners with Anthropic and Nvidia on cloud infrastructure deal, shifting further away from OpenAI

Microsoft said Tuesday it is partnering with artificial intelligence company Anthropic and chipmaker Nvidia as part of a cloud infrastructure deal that moves the software giant further away from its longtime alliance with OpenAI.

Anthropic, maker of the chatbot Claude that competes with OpenAI’s ChatGPT, said it is committed to buying $30 billion in computing capacity from Microsoft’s Azure cloud computing platform.

As part of the partnership, Nvidia will also invest up to $10 billion in Anthropic, and Microsoft will invest up to $5 billion in the San Francisco-based startup.

The joint announcements by CEOs Dario Amodei of Anthropic, Satya Nadella of Microsoft, and Jensen Huang of Nvidia came just ahead of the opening of Microsoft’s annual Ignite developer conference.

“This is all about deepening our commitment to bringing the best infrastructure, model choice and applications to our customers,” Nadella said on a video call with the other two executives, adding that it builds on the “critical” partnership Microsoft still has with OpenAI.

Microsoft was, until earlier this year, the exclusive cloud provider for OpenAI and made the technology behind ChatGPT the foundation for its own AI assistant, Copilot. But the two companies moved farther apart and their business agreements were amended as OpenAI increasingly sought to secure its own cloud capacity through big deals with Oracle, SoftBank, and other data center developers and chipmakers.

Asked in September if OpenAI could do more with those new computing partnerships than it could with Microsoft, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman told The Associated Press his company was “severely limited for the value we can offer to people.”

At the same time, Microsoft holds a roughly 27% stake in the new for-profit corporation that OpenAI, founded as a nonprofit, is forming to advance its commercial ambitions as the world’s most valuable startup.

Anthropic, founded by ex-OpenAI leaders in 2021, said Claude will now be the “only frontier model” available to customers of the three biggest cloud computing providers: Amazon, which remains Anthropic’s primary cloud provider, and Google and Microsoft.

AI products like Claude and ChatGPT take huge amounts of energy and computing power to build and operate, and neither OpenAI nor Anthropic is yet turning a profit. As part of the deal, Nvidia said Anthropic will have access to up to a gigawatt of capacity from its specialized AI chips.

Huang said he’s “admired the work of Anthropic and Dario for a long time, and this is the first time we are going to deeply partner with Anthropic to accelerate Claude.”

—Matt O’Brien, AP technology writer

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