AMD to Supply Anthropic with AI Servers, Invest $5 Billion

Advanced Micro Devices said on 22nd July it will sell Anthropic tens of billions of dollars' worth of artificial intelligence servers and invest as much as $5 billion in the startup, securing a significant customer for its chips as it works to loosen Nvidia's grip on the AI computing market .

Anthropic will buy up to two gigawatts of AMD's latest Instinct MI450 processors, with deployment beginning in the first half of 2027. AMD's investment is tied to specific deployment milestones. The arrangement is the latest example of a circular deal in the AI industry, where chipmakers take stakes in the same companies that purchase their hardware. Nvidia has been in talks to invest $30 billion in OpenAI .

For AMD, the deal deepens its credibility as the second player behind Nvidia and supports what Emarketer analyst Jacob Bourne described as slow but steady share gains underpinning its AI growth story. AMD shares rose 2.4 percent on the announcement and have more than doubled in value this year. The company struck a similar multi-year agreement with OpenAI in October that gave the ChatGPT maker an option to acquire up to roughly 10 percent of AMD .

Anthropic has been moving aggressively to lock in computing capacity as demand for its Claude models grows. It agreed in May to lease the full power of SpaceX's Colossus 1 facility in Memphis, which houses more than 220,000 Nvidia processors. Meta is also in talks to lease computing power to Anthropic in a deal that could be worth up to $10 billion over two years . Tom Brown, Anthropic's co-founder and head of compute, said access to computing capacity is essential to keeping Claude at the frontier and meeting customer demand .

Under the new agreement, Anthropic will use some of the AMD chips at its own data centres and lease additional capacity through cloud providers. AMD was also in discussions to provide a financial backstop for Anthropic's future data-centre leases, according to the Wall Street Journal, which first reported the news .