AMD announced on Wednesday a strategic partnership with Anthropic that includes an investment of up to $5 billion in the artificial intelligence company, marking the chipmaker’s latest aggressive move to challenge Nvidia’s dominance in the AI computing market. Under the deal, Anthropic will deploy 2 gigawatts of AMD’s Instinct MI450 Series graphics processing units housed in AMD Helios rack-scale solutions. The first gigawatt of that capacity is expected to come online during the first half of next year, according to a company release.
Lisa Su, AMD’s chair and chief executive, said the company is thrilled to deepen its relationship with Anthropic and deploy its Helios platform at gigawatt scale. The investment builds on AMD’s growing footprint in the AI infrastructure space, where it has positioned itself as the primary alternative to Nvidia. The chipmaker recently struck a separate arrangement with OpenAI, under which it issued warrants for up to 160 million shares of common stock, equivalent to roughly 10% of the company, with vesting tied to deployment milestones and share price targets.
For Anthropic, the agreement is the newest entry in a remarkable string of infrastructure deals aimed at satisfying surging demand for its Claude models. The company warned investors back in April that usage was putting inevitable strain on its systems, affecting reliability and performance during peak periods. Since then it has secured a $1.25-billion-per-month deal through May 2029 with Elon Musk’s SpaceX for compute capacity at the Colossus 1 data center in Memphis, along with multi-billion-dollar agreements involving Amazon, Google, and Broadcom.
The spending spree comes as Anthropic rides explosive growth driven largely by the popularity of Claude Code, its AI coding assistant. The company said in May that its run-rate revenue had surpassed $47 billion, a sharp jump from roughly $10 billion generated over all of last year. That same month Anthropic closed a funding round valuing it at nearly $965 billion and confidentially filed paperwork with the Securities and Exchange Commission ahead of a potential public offering that could arrive before year’s end.