The latest circular AI deal stars Anthropic, Nvidia, and Microsoft (www.businessinsider.com)

Anthropic announced a massive, circular cloud-and-capital deal: it will spend $30 billion on Microsoft Azure compute “powered by Nvidia” to scale its Claude models, while Microsoft and Nvidia will invest up to $5 billion and $10 billion in Anthropic respectively. The pact also commits Anthropic to secure up to one gigawatt of additional compute capacity composed of Nvidia’s Grace Blackwell and Vera Rubin systems, and will make Claude available across the three largest public clouds, per CEO Dario Amodei. The deal is significant because it highlights how tightly coupled model developers, cloud providers, and chipmakers have become—customers are increasingly also investors—accelerating large-scale model training and inference but raising concentration and market-risk questions. Technically, a one-gigawatt compute commitment and deployment on Grace Blackwell/Vera Rubin infrastructure signal substantial capacity for high‑throughput training and production inference, which could raise the bar for latency, model size, and multi-tenant hosting. Financially, the arrangement arrives amid Wall Street anxiety about an AI spending bubble; Nvidia’s upcoming earnings and a recent stock pullback underscore that investors are watching whether massive, circular commitments translate into sustainable revenue and meaningful competitive differentiation.