Nvidia, Microsoft invest $15B in AI startup Anthropic (finance.yahoo.com)

Nvidia and Microsoft announced a combined $15 billion investment in Anthropic — up to $10 billion from Nvidia and up to $5 billion from Microsoft — as part of a broader deal that ties Anthropic to Microsoft Azure and Nvidia’s latest chips. Anthropic, developer of the Claude family of chatbots and founded by ex-OpenAI staff, agreed to buy roughly $30 billion of Azure capacity and to adopt Nvidia’s next-generation GPU technology. CNBC sources pegged the new valuation at about $350 billion, underscoring the high stakes and rapid money flows in generative AI even as analysts warn of a potential bubble. Technically and strategically, the pact accelerates the industry’s consolidation around specialized AI compute and cloud stacks. Anthropic gains guaranteed access to high-performance GPUs that power large language models, while Nvidia and Microsoft secure long-term customers and tighter integration between model providers and infrastructure. The move intensifies competition with OpenAI, Google’s Gemini, and other rivals, and highlights compute capacity — not just models — as the bottleneck and commercial lever for future AI services. Market reaction was muted-to-negative in tech stocks, reflecting broader sell-offs and investor concern about valuation and overheating in the sector.