AMD Challenges Nvidia with Multi-Billion-Dollar Deal with Anthropic

To break Nvidia’s dominance in the AI chip market, U.S. semiconductor company AMD has signed a major agreement worth tens of billions of dollars with artificial intelligence company Anthropic, involving the supply of next-generation AI servers.

The collaboration was first reported by The Wall Street Journal. Following the news, AMD shares surged sharply in pre-market trading. This multi-year agreement is one of AMD’s most significant enterprise contracts to date. Under the agreement, Anthropic will purchase AMD’s next-generation Instinct MI450 chips with computing capacity of up to 2 gigawatts, with deliveries expected to begin in the first half of 2027. At the same time, AMD has committed to investing up to US$5 billion directly into Anthropic as key deployment milestones are achieved, marking AMD’s first equity investment in the AI company.

AMD Chief Executive Officer Lisa Su stated that the company has long aimed to become a key part of Anthropic’s infrastructure development, and that engineering teams from both companies have been working together behind the scenes for several months.

For Anthropic, the partnership secures critical computing resources at a time when AI computing capacity is becoming increasingly constrained. The AI company currently runs its large-scale training and inference workloads across multiple chip platforms, including Google’s Tensor Processing Units (TPUs), Amazon’s Trainium chips, and Nvidia GPUs. Under the new agreement, Anthropic will deploy AMD chips directly in its own data centres while also leasing additional computing capacity through major cloud service providers and specialised partners.

Lisa Su emphasised that building large-scale infrastructure requires extensive advance planning. “You can’t wake up one morning and say, ‘I need one gigawatt of computing power tomorrow.’ In reality, deployments must be planned 12 months, 18 months, or even 24 months in advance.”

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AMD is also exploring the possibility of providing financial guarantees for Anthropic’s future data centre leasing. This trend is becoming increasingly common across the industry, as chipmakers compete to help leading AI startups address the enormous infrastructure financing demands required for the next generation of frontier AI models.