Anthropic valued in range of $350 billion following investment deal with Microsoft, Nvidia
Microsoft on tuesday announced new strategic partnerships with Nvidia and AI startup Anthropic, the latest sign that the company is working to reduce its reliance on OpenAI.
As part of the deal, Microsoft will invest $5 billion in Anthropic and Nvidia will invest $10 billion in the startup.
The investments increased Anthropic’s value to $350 billion, from $183 billion in September, according to a source close to the deal. Terms of the company’s next round are still being finalized, the person said.
Anthropic has committed to purchasing $30 billion of Azure computing capacity from Microsoft and has signed a contract for up to one gigawatt of additional computing capacity. a blog post. Anthropic has also committed to purchasing up to one gigawatt of computing capacity with Nvidia’s Grace Blackwell and Vera Rubin systems.
“This is a dream come true for us,” Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said in a video released Tuesday. “You know, we’ve long admired Anthropic and Dario’s work, and this will be the first time we’ve formed a deep partnership with that Anthropic to bring Claude up to speed.”
This is the first time Nvidia and Anthropic have collaborated to “support Anthropic’s future growth,” the blog post said. The companies will work together on engineering and design to optimize Anthropic’s models for performance and efficiency and to optimize Nvidia architectures for Anthropic’s specific workloads.
Microsoft invested billions of dollars in support for Anthropic rival OpenAI as early as 2019. OpenAI was founded in 2015 as a nonprofit research laboratory but has become one of the fastest-growing commercial organizations on the planet in recent years following the launch of its ChatGPT chatbot.
OpenAI completed its recapitalization last month, and Microsoft officially outlined its partnership with the startup. Microsoft owns a stake in OpenAI’s for-profit business valued at $135 billion, or roughly 27% of the company on a converted diluted basis.
Anthropic was founded in 2021 by former OpenAI research executives, including CEO Dario Amodei. AmazonThe backed company is best known for developing a family of large language models called Claude.
Amazon Web Services takes Anthropic’s name primary cloud provider in 2023 and primary training partner Amazon will continue to serve in both roles, Anthropic said Tuesday.
“As an industry, we need to move beyond any zero-sum narrative or any over-the-top claims of a winner,” Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said in the video. “What’s needed now is the hard work of building together broad, resilient capabilities so that this technology can deliver real, tangible local success to every country, every industry, and every customer. The opportunity is too big to approach any other way.”
Nvidia is scheduled to report third-quarter earnings on Wednesday.
