The Newest Tech Trio: Microsoft, NVIDIA and Anthropic Announce Multi-Billion Dollar Strategic Partnership

Amid the disruption caused by Cloudflare's outage to the world's internet on Tuesday, three major tech companies announced a significant collaboration.

Microsoft, NVIDIA and Claude AI proprietor Anthropic revealed their new strategic partnership, which will see both Microsoft and NVIDIA commit a combined £11.4 billion ($15bn) investment in Anthropic. In return, Anthropic will purchase £22.8 billion ($30bn) worth of Microsoft Azure compute capacity and contract up to an additional gigawatt of compute power.

Claude AI Comes to Microsoft Foundry

The new partnership expands the existing relationship between Anthropic and Microsoft, offering businesses broader access to Claude. Microsoft Foundry customers will now have access to frontier Claude models, including Claude Sonnet 4.5, Claude Opus 4.1 and Claude Haiku 4.5.

This development makes Claude the only frontier model available across all three major global cloud platforms: Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform and Microsoft Azure.

'We're excited to bring our models as a choice to Microsoft Azure, and Anthropic will be the first model that is available on all three of the biggest clouds,' said Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei in a video announcing the deal.

Despite Claude AI's arrival on Microsoft Foundry, Amazon will remain Anthropic's primary cloud provider and training partner.

Meanwhile, NVIDIA and Anthropic will collaborate for the first time to optimise the performance of Anthropic's models and to strengthen future NVIDIA architectures for Anthropic workloads, according to Microsoft's blog post.

Microsoft's Relaxed OpenAI Partnership Made the Deal Possible

The arrangement with Anthropic comes only weeks after Microsoft finalised a new partnership agreement with OpenAI.

Following OpenAI's controversial restructuring on 28 October, Microsoft signed a revised deal that reduced its ownership stake in OpenAI's for-profit arm. Under the new terms, Microsoft now owns 27 per cent on an as-converted diluted basis, down from the previous 32.5 per cent.

The agreement also extended Microsoft's intellectual property rights to artificial general intelligence (AGI), defined as systems capable of matching or surpassing human cognitive ability. Microsoft's IP rights for AGI have been extended to 2032, but access to OpenAI's research is limited to 2030 or until an independent panel verifies that OpenAI has achieved AGI.

The updated deal does not cover OpenAI's consumer hardware projects, including a device being developed with Apple designer Jony Ive. However, it explicitly grants Microsoft the freedom to pursue AGI independently or in partnership with other companies, enabling the new collaboration with Anthropic.

OpenAI is also contractually required to purchase an additional £190 billion ($250bn) of Azure services.

AI Bubble Concerns Persist

The announcement has intensified concerns about a growing 'AI bubble' on Wall Street, driven by massive spending commitments from tech giants and soaring valuations of AI developers.

The partnership, alongside a potential investment from Google, is expected to push Anthropic's valuation to £266.1 billion ($350bn), a move that is likely to have significant implications for the stock market.