Microsoft wants to party with Anthropic with a gigawatt of AI brainpower

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Microsoft just announced a hefty new partnership with Anthropic, one that will bring the AI startup’s Claude models to Microsoft Foundry for the first time. 

And in exchange? Anthropic is agreeing to spend a casual $30 billion on Azure compute and, because this is what the cool AI labs do now, reserve up to one gigawatt of additional compute capacity. 

(Yes, like Back to the Future levels of power, but instead of time travel, we get better chatbots.)

Foundry customers will soon be able to spin up Anthropic’s frontier models, including Claude Sonnet 4.5, Claude Opus 4.1, and Claude Haiku 4.5.

But before anyone assumes Microsoft just stole another OpenAI-sized exclusive, Amazon remains Anthropic’s primary cloud partner and training home. 

Think of it as a joint-custody situation where Amazon gets weekdays and Microsoft gets alternate weekends with Claude.

Nvidia is also crashing the party with its own partnership announcement. 

Anthropic is committing to optimizing its models for Nvidia’s future architectures, including Blackwell and the gloriously named Vera Rubin systems, and plans to deploy up to a gigawatt of compute on Nvidia hardware. 

Nvidia, ever the generous GPU overlord, is investing up to $10 billion in Anthropic, with Microsoft throwing in another $5 billion for good measure.

This whole arrangement is possible because Microsoft finally untangled some exclusivity knots with OpenAI. 

After OpenAI’s recent corporate restructuring, the two renewed their deal: Microsoft keeps IP rights through 2032, even for post-AGI models, and they’ve agreed that an independent panel gets to referee whether AGI actually happens. 

OpenAI now has more freedom to collaborate with others, release open-weight models, and pick cloud providers that aren’t Microsoft, all of which opened the door for Microsoft to deepen ties with Anthropic without starting another AI custody battle.

Microsoft has already been quietly leaning into Anthropic’s work. 

Its Copilot tools have increasingly favored the Claude family, even picking Claude 4 over GPT-5 in Visual Studio Code’s auto-model feature. 

And Microsoft 365 Copilot users recently got access to Claude Sonnet 4 and Opus 4.1.