By MATT O’BRIEN
Microsoft announced Tuesday that it is partnering with artificial intelligence company Anthropic and chipmaker Nvidia in a cloud infrastructure deal that moves the software giant away from its longstanding alliance with OpenAI.
Anthropic, maker of the Claude chatbot that competes with OpenAI’s ChatGPT, said it was committed to buying $30 billion in computing capacity from Microsoft’s Azure cloud computing platform.
As part of the partnership, Nvidia will also invest up to $10 billion in Anthropic, and Microsoft will invest up to $5 billion in the San Francisco-based startup.
The joint announcements from CEOs Dario Amodei of Anthropic, Satya Nadella of Microsoft and Jensen Huang of Nvidia came just before the opening of Microsoft’s annual Ignite developers conference.
“This is about deepening our commitment to offering our customers the best infrastructure, the best choice of models and applications,” Nadella said in a video call with the two other executives, adding that it builds on the “critical” partnership Microsoft still has with OpenAI.
Microsoft was, until earlier this year, the exclusive cloud provider for OpenAI and has made the technology behind ChatGPT the basis of its own AI assistant, Copilot. But the two companies drifted apart and their business deals were changed as OpenAI increasingly sought to secure its own cloud capacity through big deals with Oracle, SoftBank and other data center developers and chipmakers.
When asked in September whether OpenAI could do more with these new IT partnerships than with Microsoft, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman told the Associated Press that his company was “severely limited by the value we can deliver to people.”
At the same time, Microsoft owns a roughly 27% stake in the new for-profit company that OpenAI, founded as a nonprofit, is creating to advance its business ambitions as the world’s most valuable startup.
Anthropic, founded by former OpenAI executives in 2021, said Claude will now be the “only frontier model” available to customers of the three largest cloud computing providers: Amazon, which remains Anthropic’s main cloud provider, and Google and Microsoft.
AI products like Claude and ChatGPT require enormous amounts of energy and computing power to build and operate, and neither OpenAI nor Anthropic is turning a profit yet. As part of the deal, Nvidia said Anthropic would have access to up to a gigawatt of capacity through its specialized AI chips.
Huang said he has “admired Anthropic and Dario’s work for a long time, and this is the first time we will partner deeply with Anthropic to accelerate Claude.”
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