AMD has agreed to invest up to $5 billion in Anthropic under an infrastructure agreement covering tens of billions of dollars’ worth of AI systems.
Anthropic will deploy up to two gigawatts of capacity using AMD’s Instinct MI450-series accelerators, with deployment of the first gigawatt beginning in the first half of 2027. AMD’s investment will be tied to Anthropic meeting certain deployment milestones, although the companies have not disclosed the conditions attached to them.
The companies have not said that Anthropic must use AMD’s investment to pay for the systems. The transaction combines an equity commitment from AMD with a large hardware order from Anthropic under separate parts of the agreement.
AMD ties financial incentives to chip deployments
The Anthropic agreement follows other AMD transactions that combine large infrastructure orders with financial arrangements involving customers. In October, AMD agreed to supply OpenAI with systems supporting up to six gigawatts of capacity and issued warrants that could allow the ChatGPT developer to acquire about 10% of the chipmaker.
The OpenAI warrants vest in stages as deployment, commercial, and share-price conditions are met. AMD said the agreement could generate tens of billions of dollars in revenue.
AMD reached another agreement with Meta in February covering up to six gigawatts of GPU capacity. That deal also included performance-based warrants tied to shipment and purchase targets.
The structures differ across the three agreements. AMD is making a direct investment in Anthropic, while the OpenAI and Meta agreements give those companies rights to acquire AMD shares when specified conditions are met.
Nvidia has also held talks about investing up to $30 billion in OpenAI, Reuters reported. Chip suppliers have paired investments or equity incentives with commercial agreements involving major AI developers.
AMD’s Anthropic investment is tied to the rollout of AMD-based infrastructure. However, the companies have not disclosed Anthropic’s purchase obligations, cancellation rights, the valuation attached to AMD’s investment, or the treatment of delayed deployments.
AMD said it has committed to make the strategic equity investment in the future, meaning the full amount has not yet been transferred. The company has not disclosed the investment timetable beyond its connection to deployment milestones.
Anthropic will deploy AMD Helios systems featuring MI455X GPUs from the Instinct MI450 series, EPYC “Venice” processors, Pensando networking, and ROCm software. The deployment builds on Anthropic’s existing use of AMD’s earlier MI355X accelerators.
The configuration covers an integrated rack-scale platform spanning accelerators, CPUs, networking, and software, rather than a standalone GPU purchase.
“We are thrilled to deepen our partnership with Anthropic and deploy AMD Helios at gigawatt scale,” AMD chair and chief executive Lisa Su said. “This collaboration brings together Anthropic’s leadership in frontier AI with the full strength of AMD high-performance computing.”
Su said the companies intend to establish Helios as a platform for future AI infrastructure deployments. Her comments reflect AMD’s effort to expand the use of its rack-scale systems among companies developing and operating large AI models.
The deployment adds Anthropic to AMD’s list of customers planning to use its next-generation accelerator platform at gigawatt scale. AMD has announced prospective commitments of up to six gigawatts each from OpenAI and Meta, and two gigawatts from Anthropic.
The two-gigawatt Anthropic commitment represents 2,000 megawatts of power capacity. AMD executives have said that developing one gigawatt of AI computing infrastructure can cost tens of billions of dollars, depending on the equipment and facilities involved.
Anthropic has separately secured more than 300 megawatts through SpaceX’s Colossus 1 facility in Memphis, which contains more than 220,000 Nvidia GPUs. At its full planned scale, the AMD deployment would represent more than six times the power capacity Anthropic obtained through Colossus 1, although the figures do not measure equivalent computing performance because the facilities use different hardware and deployment models.
Anthropic plans to install some of the AMD systems in its own data centres, according to The Wall Street Journal. Other systems are expected to be hosted by cloud providers and specialist AI infrastructure companies.
AMD and Anthropic are also seeking operators capable of hosting the planned systems. AMD chief executive Lisa Su said gigawatt-scale capacity requires planning between 12 and 24 months before deployment.
The Wall Street Journal reported that AMD had discussed providing financial guarantees for Anthropic’s future data-centre leases. The companies have not confirmed the proposed terms or disclosed the extent of AMD’s obligations under any guarantee.
Anthropic adds AMD to its multi-supplier compute network
The AMD systems will operate alongside infrastructure based on Nvidia GPUs, Amazon Trainium processors, and Google tensor processing units. Anthropic has continued to secure capacity through direct deployments, cloud agreements, and leased data-centre facilities.
Amazon remains Anthropic’s primary cloud and training partner. Anthropic has secured up to five gigawatts of capacity from the company and said it uses more than one million Trainium2 processors, with Trainium3 deployments planned during 2026.
Anthropic has also secured multiple gigawatts of next-generation TPU capacity from Google and Broadcom, with deployments expected to begin in 2027. Claude is available through Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, and Microsoft’s Azure-based Foundry platform.
“Running across a diversified range of hardware lets us map the right workloads to the right hardware,” Anthropic co-founder and chief compute officer Tom Brown said. He said the AMD partnership would give Anthropic additional capacity while allowing the companies to optimise the systems used for training and serving Claude.
“Access to compute is central to keeping Claude at the frontier and meeting demand from our customers,” Brown said. “By partnering with AMD across the stack, we are securing the capacity we need and optimising it for training and serving Claude.”
The company has also agreed to use computing capacity at SpaceX’s Colossus facilities and has discussed leasing infrastructure from Meta. Reuters reported that the potential Meta agreement could be worth up to $10 billion over two years.
The AMD agreement also includes a multi-year engineering programme under which the companies will use Claude to optimise workloads for Instinct accelerators and support the development of AMD’s ROCm software platform. AMD plans to deploy Claude across its engineering and product-development teams.
The work gives Anthropic a role in adapting Claude workloads to AMD’s hardware and software environment. It also makes Anthropic both a customer of AMD’s infrastructure and a participant in the development of the software used to run workloads on that infrastructure.
AMD shares rose 2.4% after the agreement was announced. The company’s stock has more than doubled since the start of the year, outperforming the broader Philadelphia Semiconductor Index.
(Photo by Rubaitul Azad)
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