① AMD has signed a multi-billion-dollar AI server procurement agreement with Anthropic, under which the latter will purchase up to 2 gigawatts of AI servers powered by AMD’s latest Instinct MI450 chips starting in the first half of 2027; ② AMD will also invest up to $5 billion in Anthropic, marking AMD’s first investment in this AI startup.
Reuters, July 22 (Editor: Niu Zhanlin) — According to media reports on Wednesday, Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) has signed a multi-billion-dollar AI server procurement agreement with Anthropic, further strengthening AMD’s competitive position in the industry, while also committing to invest up to $5 billion in Anthropic.
Following the announcement, AMD’s stock initially rose in pre-market trading but quickly gave up those gains. Dragged down by continued weakness across tech stocks, AMD shares turned negative by approximately 2.5% before the market open.
Despite the muted market reaction, this multi-year partnership remains one of AMD’s most significant enterprise collaborations to date. Under the agreement, Anthropic will procure up to 2 gigawatts of AI servers equipped with AMD’s latest-generation Instinct MI450 chips beginning in the first half of 2027.
Industry executives noted that 1 gigawatt of AI computing capacity is sufficient to meet the electricity needs of approximately 750,000 U.S. households, and building AI infrastructure at this scale would cost roughly $50 billion.
In addition, as deployment milestones outlined in the agreement are progressively achieved, AMD will invest up to $5 billion in Anthropic. This marks AMD’s first investment in the AI startup.
For AMD, this collaboration holds significant strategic importance. The chipmaker is currently striving to challenge NVIDIA’s dominant position in the rapidly growing AI hardware market and further expand its roster of major AI clients.
AMD CEO Lisa Su stated, “We have long aspired to become a key component of Anthropic’s infrastructure.” She added that engineering teams from both companies have already been collaborating for some time.
Currently, Anthropic’s models run across multiple AI chip platforms, including Google’s TPUs (Tensor Processing Units), Amazon’s Trainium chips, and NVIDIA GPUs. Under the agreement, Anthropic will acquire AMD chips for use in its own data centers and will also lease AMD-based computing capacity through major cloud providers as well as emerging cloud service vendors.
Lisa Su remarked, “You can’t just wake up one morning and say, ‘I need 1 gigawatt of computing power tomorrow.’ In reality, you must plan your future compute requirements 12, 18, or even 24 months in advance.”
According to a knowledgeable source, AMD is also in discussions with Anthropic and may provide financial guarantees for its data center lease agreements in the future.
In recent years, large technology companies with investment-grade credit ratings have increasingly provided guarantees for data center leases or related debt obligations of AI startups. This has enabled otherwise credit-constrained AI firms to secure financing on more favorable terms. For example, Google has agreed to guarantee certain data center projects for Anthropic to help it gain greater access to TPU computing resources.
Over the past few years, AMD has actively expanded its GPU market share. The company has benefited from the growing trend among AI developers seeking to reduce reliance on NVIDIA. Recently, AMD has secured large-scale partnership agreements with OpenAI and Meta and is actively pursuing additional emerging AI startups as customers.
Lisa Su stated that AMD has also signed an engineering collaboration agreement with Anthropic to leverage Anthropic’s Claude large language model to optimize the performance of AMD chips and associated software platforms.
Compared to NVIDIA, demand for AMD chips remains relatively weaker overall, largely because AI companies still lack sufficient experience with AMD’s software ecosystem. To win over major clients, AMD has previously offered incentives such as warrants, which grant customers the right to acquire AMD shares in the future.
For Anthropic, this agreement will help the company further meet rapidly growing demand for its AI services. Anthropic has emerged as one of the leading players in the AI race. Previously, due to surging user demand, the company was forced to limit how frequently users could access its AI services, and many customers reported frequent service outages.