Shares in Microsoft (MSFT) and Nvidia (NVDA) stock are down despite the two companies agreeing to a $30 billion deal with Anthropic. Microsoft and Nvidia plan to invest in Anthropic under a new partnership that includes a $30 billion commitment by the Claude maker to use Microsoft’s cloud services. In return, Nvidia will commit as much as $10 billion to Anthropic and Microsoft up to $5 billion, the companies said on Tuesday.
“As an industry, we really need to move beyond any type of zero-sum narrative or winner-take-all hype,” Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said Tuesday. “What’s required now is the hard work of building broad, durable capabilities together so that this technology can deliver real, tangible local success for every country, every sector, and every customer. The opportunity is simply too big to approach any other way.”
“This is a dream come true for us,” Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang added in a video on Tuesday. “You know, we’ve 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.”
The Anthropic Google Cloud deal centers on providing computing power rather than traditional capital investment. Google, already a previous investor and cloud provider for Anthropic, would supply TPUs that accelerate the training and deployment of Claude AI models. This arrangement addresses critical infrastructure needs as the AI arms race intensifies and companies compete for limited chip availability and data center capacity.
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei had this to say about their Google Cloud partnership: “We’re partnering with Google Cloud to support the next phase of Anthropic, where we’re going to deploy our AI systems to a larger set of people. This partnership gives us the cloud infrastructure performance and scale we need.” On the other hand, Microsoft has plenty of history with a direct rival of Anthropic: OpenAI. The Windows developer has been directly investing in the ChatGPT maker since 2019, and the latest high-profile deal further cements Microsoft’s place in AI.
At press time, the stock market’s recent downturn reflects investor anxiety regarding the sustainability of the AI-driven market rally, with Microsoft among the companies feeling the impact. MSFT is down 3% today, and down 4.7% in the past month.