Microsoft and Nvidia have announced a landmark strategic partnership with AI startup Anthropic, signaling a major step in reducing Microsoft’s reliance on OpenAI while accelerating the development of advanced AI models.
The collaboration, disclosed on Tuesday, comes with substantial financial commitments: Microsoft will invest up to $5 billion in Anthropic, while Nvidia will contribute up to $10 billion.
The investments have propelled Anthropic’s valuation to an estimated $350 billion, nearly doubling its $183 billion valuation in September. The exact terms of the next funding round are still being finalized, according to the companies.
Register for Tekedia Mini-MBA edition 19 (Feb 9 – May 2, 2026): big discounts for early bird.
Tekedia AI in Business Masterclass opens registrations.
Join Tekedia Capital Syndicate and co-invest in great global startups.
Register for Tekedia AI Lab: From Technical Design to Deployment (next edition begins Jan 24 2026).
Under the agreement, Anthropic has committed to purchasing $30 billion of compute capacity from Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform, with additional contracts for up to one gigawatt of compute capacity. Nvidia will supply Anthropic with up to one gigawatt of compute capacity using its Grace Blackwell and Vera Rubin systems. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang described the partnership as “a dream come true” and noted that the companies will collaborate on optimizing Anthropic’s AI models for performance and efficiency while fine-tuning Nvidia’s architectures for Anthropic’s specific workloads.
Anthropic, founded in 2021 by former OpenAI executives, including CEO Dario Amodei, is best known for its Claude family of large language models. The company was initially backed by Amazon, with AWS serving as its primary cloud provider in 2023 and as its primary training partner in 2024. Microsoft and Nvidia’s new involvement adds a significant layer of strategic support, particularly in compute infrastructure and model optimization.
Microsoft’s move comes alongside its longstanding investment in OpenAI, which it has backed since 2019. OpenAI, originally a nonprofit research lab, has transformed into a commercial powerhouse with ChatGPT and other AI products. Microsoft holds an approximate 27% stake in OpenAI’s for-profit arm, valued at $135 billion.
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella framed the partnership as a collaborative effort beyond competition. “As an industry, we really need to move beyond any type of zero sum narrative or winner take all hype,” Nadella said. “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.”
The partnership highlights a growing trend of major tech firms diversifying their AI investments, balancing partnerships across multiple AI startups while expanding in-house capabilities. Analysts note that Anthropic’s large-scale compute requirements, backed by Microsoft and Nvidia, place the startup in line to compete directly with OpenAI and other leading AI developers in the enterprise and cloud AI markets.
Nvidia is set to report its third-quarter earnings on Wednesday, which may offer additional insight into how the company is capitalizing on AI infrastructure demand. Meanwhile, the Microsoft-Anthropic partnership underscores the intensifying arms race in AI, with hyperscalers investing heavily in both talent and computing resources to maintain a competitive edge.
This multi-billion-dollar collaboration signals that AI is increasingly viewed not just as a software innovation, but as a compute-intensive infrastructure challenge, which requires strategic partnerships and massive capital expenditure for scaling of its next-generation AI models.