Writing in its bog, Nvidia said Anthropic will sling one gigawatt of compute demand at its Grace Blackwell and Vera Rubin systems while Nvidia itself, with Microsoft hovering as matchmaker, will chuck up to $10 billion into the Claude maker.
Vole will add another $5 billion, which gives you some idea of how frantic the AI spendathon has become.
Nvidia said: “Anthropic’s compute commitment will initially be up to 1 gigawatt of compute capacity with Nvidia Grace Blackwell and Vera Rubin systems. As part of the partnership, Nvidia and Microsoft are committing to invest up to $10 billion and up to $5 billion, respectively, in Anthropic.”
The straightforward reading of the deal is that Anthropic needs an obscene amount of compute to keep Claude competitive, yet the backstory is far stranger. The firm only recently became one of the first customers for Google’s seventh-generation Ironwood TPUs, which were hailed as a rare and rather cheeky defection away from Nvidia’s usual silicon dominance. Industry watchers saw Google Anthropic's tie-up as a direct poke at Nvidia’s crown.
It did not help that Nvidia boss Jensen Huang has muttered about Anthropic’s closed-source tendencies, while Anthropic’s Dario Amodei has grumbled about Nvidia’s eagerness to ship AI chips to China. The pair have spent years swiping at each other like rival pub quiz captains, which made a future partnership look improbable at best.
Yet with AI outfits burning cash faster than they can raise it, the old grudges appear to have been binned. Microsoft is said to have brought the two sides together, suggesting the Big Cloud lot now sees these alliances as too important to leave to ego and bruised pride.
Nvidia’s Rubin and Blackwell kits remain the hardware of choice for most of the AI world, and Anthropic’s $1 billion in training budget underscores how vast training budgets have become. The truce shows the industry is now more willing to swallow its arguments than risk missing the next wave of AI hype, no matter how loudly everyone insisted they could go it alone.