Anthropic, a US AI company. [Reuters]
Anthropic, a US AI company. [Reuters]

A $45 billion AI alliance between Anthropic, Nvidia and Microsoft has yielded its first commercial results roughly half a year after the three companies formed their strategic partnership.

The three companies said Sunday (local time) that Anthropic's Claude family of AI models is now natively deployed on Microsoft's Azure cloud, running on Nvidia's Blackwell Ultra systems.

While Claude was previously accessible through Azure by calling the model from an external endpoint, it can now run directly within the Azure environment. The change is expected to make it easier for Azure enterprise customers who must use regionally hosted AI due to data-localization regulations to adopt Claude.

The move allows Anthropic to bring companies that use Microsoft Azure — alongside existing Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud customers — into its client base, extending its already strong foothold in the enterprise market.

Anthropic is offering its flagship model Claude Opus 4.8 and the lightweight Haiku 4.5 on Azure, with extended reasoning capabilities also supported. The deployment fulfills commitments made under a strategic partnership the three companies signed in November last year.

At the time, Nvidia and Microsoft pledged investments of $10 billion and $5 billion in Anthropic, respectively, while Anthropic agreed to purchase $30 billion worth of Microsoft cloud services running on Nvidia chips.

Nvidia stands to defend its market share by powering inference capabilities for Anthropic's AI models through its chips, while also strengthening its position as a provider of inference computing — on top of its established role in AI training.

Microsoft, meanwhile, gains by hosting a competing model in Claude alongside its core partner OpenAI, a move that helps the company retain enterprise customers who might otherwise look elsewhere.


yckim6452@heraldcorp.com