AMD logo [Reuters]
AMD logo [Reuters]

Chipmaker AMD will invest up to $5 billion in Anthropic, the developer of the AI model Claude, with Anthropic agreeing to adopt AMD's latest AI chips at scale.

The Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday that AMD and Anthropic had signed an investment and chip supply agreement.

Under the deal, Anthropic plans to deploy AMD's latest GPU, the Instinct MI450, starting with 1 gigawatt of capacity in the first half of next year and scaling up to as much as 2 GW.

Anthropic will purchase some of the chips directly and deploy them in its own data centers, while leasing the remainder through major cloud service providers or so-called neo-cloud companies that specialize in GPU infrastructure.

As part of the arrangement, AMD will invest up to $5 billion in Anthropic in stages.

The deal comes as AMD mounts a challenge to Nvidia, which dominates the AI chip market.

AI developers including Anthropic have been working to reduce their heavy reliance on Nvidia chips as they expand data center capacity.

Earlier, Google agreed to guarantee some data center contracts to give Anthropic access to its tensor processing units.

AMD CEO Lisa Su told the Wall Street Journal that she had long hoped to play a significant role in Anthropic's infrastructure.

Su also said AMD and Anthropic had signed an engineering collaboration agreement under which AMD plans to use Anthropic's Claude models to improve the performance of its chip technology.


mokiya@heraldcorp.com