AMD to invest up to $5 billion in Anthropic as part of computing power deal

Advanced Micro Devices on Wednesday announced a strategic partnership with Anthropic and said it will invest up to $5 billion in the artificial intelligence company. As part of the deal, the chipmaker said Anthropic will deploy 2 gigawatts of its AMD Instinct MI450 Series graphics processing units, or GPUs, in AMD Helios rack-scale solutions. The first gigawatt, a measure of power that's become a common metric for describing AI data center capacity, will be deployed in the first half of next year, according to a release. "We are thrilled to deepen our partnership with Anthropic and deploy AMD Helios at gigawatt scale," AMD CEO Lisa Su said in a statement. AMD has been one of the major beneficiaries of the AI boom because it's one of the companies that makes the GPUs that can train models and run large workloads. It competes directly with Nvidia, which dominates the market, but it has inked deals with a number of high-profile players in the industry, including Anthropic's rival OpenAI. Anthropic's agreement with AMD is the latest in a string of infrastructure deals the company has announced this year as it works to increase its computing capacity. The company said in April that demand for Claude has caused "inevitable strain" on its infrastructure, which impacted "reliability and performance" for its users, especially during peak hours. In May, Anthropic forged a deal with Elon Musk's SpaceX to use all of the compute capacity at his company's Colossus 1 data center in Memphis, Tennessee. Anthropic will pay SpaceX $1.25 billion per month through May 2029 as part of that deal, according to SpaceX's prospectus. The company inked a multi-billion-dollar agreement with Amazon, as well as a multi-gigawatt compute agreement with Google and Broadcom, in April. Anthropic is also in preliminary talks to lease computing power from Meta, as CNBC previously reported.