Microsoft Moves to Reduce Reliance on OpenAI
Circular Investments Gain Momentum...
AI Market Restructuring Accelerates
Microsoft and Nvidia have agreed to invest a total of $15 billion in the artificial intelligence (AI) startup Anthropic. Despite concerns over an overheated AI investment landscape, major tech companies continue to inject massive capital into the sector. In particular, Microsoft is accelerating efforts to reduce its reliance on OpenAI, a move that is seen as hastening the restructuring of the AI market.
On November 18 (local time), Microsoft announced that it had entered into a strategic partnership with Nvidia and Anthropic.
Under this agreement, Microsoft will invest $5 billion in Anthropic, while Nvidia will contribute $10 billion. As a result, Anthropic's corporate valuation has reportedly soared from $183 billion as of September to approximately $350 billion currently.
Anthropic will purchase $300 billion worth of Azure computing resources from Microsoft and has signed a contract to acquire up to an additional 1 GW of computing capacity. The company will also secure up to 1 GW of GPU computing resources by utilizing Nvidia's next-generation Grace Blackwell and Vera Rubin systems.
Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, stated, "This is a dream come true for us. I have long admired the work of Anthropic and Dario (Amodei, CEO of Anthropic), and through this first collaboration with Anthropic, we will accelerate the development of the Claude model."
Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft, emphasized, "The (AI) industry must move beyond zero-sum and winner-takes-all narratives and propaganda. What is needed now is to build broad and sustainable capabilities together so that this technology can deliver tangible and reliable results to every country, every industry, and every customer."
This deal comes amid a growing trend of "circular investment," where AI chip and cloud companies such as Nvidia and Amazon acquire stakes in AI developers like OpenAI through large-scale investments, and those AI firms, in turn, purchase computing resources from the investors. The contract among Anthropic, Microsoft, and Nvidia is considered part of this trend.
Microsoft, in particular, has led the AI era as an early investor in OpenAI, pouring billions of dollars into the company since 2019. OpenAI has driven the AI boom since the launch of its generative AI, ChatGPT, in 2022, and Microsoft has directly benefited from the surge in AI demand. Although both sides have maintained their partnership even after OpenAI recently completed its recapitalization, their relationship is no longer exclusive. OpenAI has also recently signed a $38 billion cloud computing contract with Amazon. Both OpenAI and Microsoft are now moving to reduce mutual dependence while simultaneously pursuing strategic partnerships with competitors.
Meanwhile, Anthropic was founded in 2021 by CEO Dario Amodei, a former member of OpenAI, and others. With investment and cloud infrastructure support from Amazon, Anthropic has been developing its large language model (LLM) Claude series.
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