Microsoft partners with Anthropic and Nvidia in cloud infrastructure deal

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — 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 of 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.

Microsoft was, until earlier this year, the exclusive cloud provider for OpenAI. They continue to be partners but OpenAI has increasingly sought to secure its own cloud capacity through big deals with Oracle, SoftBank and other data center developers and chipmakers.