AMD to invest up to $5 billion in Anthropic in AI chip pact

AMD (NASDAQ: AMD) said on Wednesday that it will invest as much as $5 billion in Anthropic. The investment involves a multi-year agreement under which Anthropic will use up to 2 gigawatts’ worth of AMD’s Instinct MI450 chips. The deal connects AMD with Anthropic, one of the industry’s largest chip buyers, at a moment when gaining access to advanced chips is notably difficult.

Why did AMD invest in Anthropic? Advanced Micro Devices (NASDAQ: AMD) has announced that it will take a strategic equity stake worth as much as $5 billion in Anthropic. Following the investment, Anthropic will be tied to a multi-year agreement under which it will run up to 2 gigawatts of AMD’s Instinct MI450 Series GPUs.

For AMD, which has been attempting to narrow Nvidia’s dominance of the market, the deal with Anthropic brings it one step closer to its goal. The company has also struck deals with OpenAI and Meta (NASDAQ: META) in recent months. Following the deal announcement, AMD stock climbed 8.

11% to $544.43. The Wall Street Journal put the value of the AI servers involved in the deal at “tens of billions of dollars.”

Deployment kicks off in the first half of 2027, with the first gigawatt coming online then. The hardware sits inside AMD’s Helios rack systems, which pair Instinct MI455X GPUs with the company’s EPYC “Venice” CPUs, Pensando networking gear and its ROCm software stack. The two firms are jointly scouting locations to house the chips.

For Anthropic, the deal secures its access to critical computing capacity. The company currently runs its heavy training and inference workloads with Google’s (NASDAQ: GOOGL) Tensor Processing Units, Amazon’s (NASDAQ: AMZN) Trainium chips, and Nvidia’s GPUs. “Access to compute is central to keeping Claude at the frontier and meeting demand from our customers.”

Tom Brown, the co-founder and chief compute officer of Anthropic, stated. How will Anthropic pay for the chips and what’s AMD’s role? Anthropic plans to buy some AMD chips outright for data c