Anthropic to buy $30 billion in Azure capacity in new deal with Microsoft, Nvidia (www.cnbc.com)

Microsoft and Nvidia announced a multi‑billion‑dollar strategic partnership with Anthropic: Microsoft will invest $5 billion and Nvidia $10 billion in the AI startup, while Anthropic has committed to buying $30 billion of Azure compute capacity and has reserved additional capacity up to one gigawatt, according to Microsoft’s announcement. The deal ties Anthropic tightly to Microsoft Azure and Nvidia’s GPU ecosystem and is widely read as part of Microsoft’s broader push to diversify its AI bets beyond OpenAI. Technically, a $30 billion Azure commitment and up to 1 GW of power imply long‑term, large‑scale capacity for training and serving next‑generation LLMs — think sustained fleets of Hopper/Blackwell‑class GPUs and huge data‑center power draws. Nvidia’s $10B stake signals closer alignment on GPU supply and prioritization, which could ease hardware bottlenecks for Anthropic but also intensify competition for high‑end accelerators. For the AI/ML community, the deal accelerates Anthropic’s ability to scale model training and low‑latency inference, shifts market dynamics around cloud and GPU availability, and deepens vendor lock‑in tradeoffs (Azure + Nvidia) as startups and enterprises weigh cost, performance, and resilience in their model pipelines.