Nvidia Corp and Microsoft Corp on Tuesday announced investments totaling US$15 billion in artificial intelligence (AI) start-up Anthropic PBC, creator of the Claude chatbot, amid frenzied spending on the technology and growing fears of a bubble.
AI chip powerhouse Nvidia committed up to US$10 billion, while Microsoft — which owns 27 percent of Anthropic rival OpenAI — pledged up to US$5 billion to the San Francisco-based start-up.
Microsoft also continues investing heavily in its own Copilot AI that runs on the company’s Azure platform.
Photo: Reuters
The deal was part of a sweeping agreement that saw Anthropic commit to purchasing US$30 billion in Microsoft’s cloud computing capacity and adopt the latest versions of Nvidia’s chip technology.
The joint announcements by CEOs Dario Amodei of Anthropic, Satya Nadella of Microsoft, and Jensen Huang (黃仁勳) of Nvidia came just ahead of the opening of Microsoft’s annual Ignite developer conference.
“We’re increasingly going to be customers of each other,” Nadella said in an online video announcing the deal. “We will use Anthropic models. They will use our infrastructure, and we’ll go to market together to help our customers realize the value of AI.”
The investments mark a significant realignment in the generative AI sector, where competition has intensified between ChatGPT-maker OpenAI and rivals including Anthropic, but also Google, which released its latest Gemini model on Tuesday.
Anthropic was launched in 2021 by former OpenAI staff and positions itself as prioritizing safety in AI development. Its flagship product is the Claude chatbot and family of models.
Tech industry rivals, which also include Amazon.com Inc, Meta Platforms Inc and Elon Musk’s xAI, have been pouring tens of billions of dollars into AI since the blockbuster launch of the first version of ChatGPT in late 2022.
Meanwhile, Nvidia has become a coveted source of high-performance graphics processing units (GPUs) tailored for generative AI. The company’s GPUs, originally designed for gaming systems, have become the essential building blocks of AI applications, with tech giants scrambling to secure them for their data centers and AI projects.
Sources told CNBC that the fresh investment valued Anthropic at US$350 billion, making it one of the world’s most valuable companies. OpenAI was most recently valued at US$500 billion.
The massive investment in Anthropic comes a month after Nvidia announced it would pump as much as US$100 billion into OpenAI, building infrastructure for future generations of the technology.
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