AMD to invest up to $5bn in Anthropic in chip deal

AMD has struck a multibillion-dollar deal with Anthropic, which includes the US chipmaker making an up to $5bn investment in the creator of Claude Code.

As part of the agreement, Anthropic has committed to buying tens of billions of dollars of AMD’s latest AI server chips, boosting the chipmaker’s challenge to Nvidia.

The deal will add 2 gigawatts of computing capacity to Anthropic’s platform, with the first gigawatt — equivalent to the power output of a single nuclear reactor — due to come online in the first half of next year.

The transaction is the latest circular arrangement between a frontier AI company and a chipmaker, with both OpenAI and Anthropic enmeshed with suppliers via direct investments and supply contracts.

“Access to compute is central to keeping Claude at the frontier and meeting demand from our customers,” said Tom Brown, co-founder and chief compute officer at Anthropic.

The deal adds AMD’s processors to Anthropic’s increasingly diverse portfolio of AI infrastructure, which also includes chips from Nvidia, Amazon and Google. The Wall Street Journal first reported the deal.

AMD’s up to $5bn investment in Anthropic, announced by the semiconductor company on Wednesday, is dependent on meeting certain milestones.

The deal comes as AI companies are racing to lock in computing capacity amid an industry-wide semiconductor shortage that has sent chip stocks surging in the past few months. AMD shares are up more than 140 per cent so far this year.

OpenAI on Wednesday announced it had secured 3.2GW of power for a new data centre facility in the US state of Georgia, in a deal worth tens of billions of dollars. Bloomberg first reported the contract with Georgia Power company. The project is scheduled to come online between 2028 and 2032.

Anthropic has struck a series of major computing deals this year, including with Google, Broadcom and Amazon Web Services, giving the San Francisco-based company access to more than 10GW of new capacity as it aims to meet rising demand for its products.

In May, Anthropic agreed to pay Elon Musk’s SpaceX $1.25bn a month to lease the rocket maker’s data centre space, in a deal that ties the fortunes of the two competitors together.

It marks a turnaround for Anthropic chief Dario Amodei, who late last year took aim at competitors who were spending aggressively to secure a supply of computing power ahead of actual demand. “I think there are some players who are ‘YOLO’-ing, who pull the risk dial too far,” he said.

Despite the frantic pace of build-out, data centre construction in the US and elsewhere is increasingly confronted with opposition from local communities.

OpenAI said it would pay hundreds of millions of dollars in state and local taxes related to the Georgia project and invest $80mn in “community benefits”, including support for local schools and healthcare.