Microsoft partners with Anthropic and Nvidia in cloud infrastructure deal

The joint announcement came from chief executives Satya Nadella of Microsoft, Dario Amodei of Anthropic and Jensen Huang of Nvidia (PA)

Microsoft has said it is partnering with artificial intelligence company Anthropic and chipmaker Nvidia as part of a cloud infrastructure deal that moves the software giant further away from its longtime alliance with OpenAI.

Anthropic, maker of the chatbot Claude that competes with OpenAI’s ChatGPT, said it is committed to buying 30 billion dollars (£22.7 billion) of computing capacity from Microsoft’s Azure cloud computing platform.

As part of the partnership, Nvidia will also invest up to 10 billion dollars (£7.6 billion) in Anthropic, and Microsoft will invest up to five billion dollars (£3.8 billion) in the San Francisco-based startup.

The joint announcements by chief executives Dario Amodei of Anthropic, Satya Nadella of Microsoft, and Jensen Huang of Nvidia came just ahead of the opening of Microsoft’s annual Ignite developer conference.

Microsoft was, until earlier this year, the exclusive cloud provider for OpenAI.

They continue to be partners but OpenAI has increasingly sought to secure its own cloud capacity through big deals with Oracle, SoftBank and other data centre developers and chipmakers.