AMD and Anthropic Forge AI Alliance Worth Tens of Trillions of Won, Targeting NVIDIA

【Financial News, New York = Reporter Lee Byung-chul】 Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. (AMD) has signed a contract to supply AI servers worth tens of billions of dollars to generative AI company Anthropic, directly challenging NVIDIA's dominance. By agreeing not only to supply next-generation AI chips but also to invest up to $5 billion directly, AMD is accelerating a strategy to establish itself as a key partner in the AI ecosystem.
According to The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) and other outlets on the 22nd local time, AMD will supply Anthropic with up to 2 gigawatts (GW) of its next-generation AI accelerator, the AMD Instinct MI450 series GPU, starting in the first half of next year. A 2 GW capacity is comparable to the power output of two nuclear power plants.
AMD also plans to invest up to $5 billion in Anthropic once certain deployment targets are met. This will be the first time AMD has made a direct investment in Anthropic.
Lisa Su, CEO of AMD, said, "We have long wanted to become a core partner in Anthropic's infrastructure." She added, "Our engineering teams have already worked closely together for a considerable period of time."
The deal symbolically highlights a broader trend in which AI companies are competing fiercely to secure computing resources rather than focusing solely on model performance. Anthropic currently uses not only NVIDIA Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) chips, but also Google TPU and Amazon Trainium chips. With AMD now added to that mix, the company will reduce its dependence on any single supplier and diversify its AI infrastructure.
Anthropic plans to install some of AMD's chips in its own data centers and secure the rest through leases from major cloud providers and so-called Neocloud operators. The two companies are also jointly searching for data centers where the chips will be deployed.
Su also emphasized how intense the race to secure AI computing capacity has become.
She said, "You can't suddenly decide one day that you need 1 GW of computing power by tomorrow and just get it." She added, "You have to plan ahead 12 months, 18 months, or even 24 months in advance."
AMD is also reportedly discussing a plan to provide a financial backstop for Anthropic's future data center lease agreements. Google recently provided a backstop for some data center contracts so that Anthropic could use TPU chips.
AMD has recently strengthened its presence in the AI chip market by securing major customers such as OpenAI, Meta Platforms, and now Anthropic. NVIDIA still leads the market, but analysts say AMD is benefiting as AI companies push to diversify their supply chains.
Su also revealed that the two companies had signed a separate engineering collaboration agreement. AMD plans to use Anthropic's AI model Claude to improve the performance of its own chips and software.
 
[email protected] Reporter Lee Byung-chul Reporter