SANTA CLARA — Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) announced a monumental partnership on Wednesday to sell tens of billions of dollars’ worth of AI servers to generative AI startup Anthropic, alongside a strategic investment of up to $5 billion in the Claude creator. The high-profile transaction marks the latest high-stakes “circular deal” sweeping the technology landscape, wherein semiconductor manufacturers financially back the very AI enterprises that serve as their primary infrastructure buyers. This model mirrors similar strategic moves across the sector, including ongoing talks by industry rival Nvidia to inject $30 billion into ChatGPT creator OpenAI. Following the announcement during early trading hours, shares of the Santa Clara, California-based AMD ticked upward by 0.5 percent, continuing a massive fiscal rally that has seen the stock more than double in value over the course of the year.
Under the terms of the agreement, Anthropic will purchase up to two gigawatts of AMD’s next-generation Instinct MI450 chips starting in the first half of 2027. According to AMD executives, scaling out one gigawatt of high-performance computing power—roughly equivalent to the electricity required to power 750,000 American homes—carries a double-digit billion-dollar price tag. The hardware acquisition provides Anthropic with vital computational capacity to expand its highly adopted enterprise products, such as Claude Code. Tom Brown, co-founder and compute lead at Anthropic, stressed that gaining long-term access to massive compute infrastructure is crucial to keeping Claude at the technological frontier. To clear capacity bottlenecks, Anthropic has aggressively scaled its infrastructure footprints, having recently rented SpaceX’s entire 300-megawatt Colossus 1 facility in Memphis while exploring a potential $10 billion computing lease with Meta Platforms.
