Following the restructured deal with OpenAI, Microsoft is diversifying its AI investments. The company says it will invest up to $10 billion in Anthropic. Meanwhile, NVIDIA has pledged up to $5 billion to the cloud maker. The three-way partnership, which includes several other commitments, could be seen as evidence that the AI bubble is about to burst.
As part of the deal, Anthropic has committed to purchasing $30 billion of Microsoft Azure cloud computing capacity. Anthropic says it will also contract up to one gigawatt of additional capacity. Additionally, Microsoft Foundry customers will have access to multiple cloud models. These include Sonnet 4.5, Opus 4.1 and Haiku 4.5.
Meanwhile, NVIDIA and Anthropic will work together to improve Anthropic’s AI models for NVIDIA hardware. The pair will also adapt future NVIDIA architectures to Anthropic’s needs.
All this is against the backdrop of Microsoft’s recently renewed partnership with OpenAI, which weakens their exclusivity. It didn’t take long to see its obvious results. Earlier this month, the ChatGPT maker signed a $38 billion cloud contract with Amazon. And last week, Anthropic said it would use AWS AI chips after Amazon invested an additional $4 billion in the cloud maker.
Two Spider-Men memes: Two versions of the web-slinger, pointing at each other. (marvel.com)
Still feeling dizzy? To borrow imagery from the “two Spider-Men” meme, the AI world increasingly looks like a big group of web-slingers, all pointing at each other. Only in this case, each index finger is tossing billions of dollars to help prop up the other Spider-Man. (Never mind the AI layoffs.) It’s too early to say how this all plays out, but the circular nature here makes it easy to understand why some believe we’re looking at a bubble. NVIDIA’s earnings tomorrow may tell us more.