AMD to invest up to $5 billion in Anthropic

AMD has announced that it will make a strategic equity investment of up to $5 billion in Anthropic, the company behind gen AI platform, Claude. 

It comes as the pair announced they will partner to deploy up to two gigawatts of AMD Instinct MI450 Series GPUs in the AMD Helios rack-scale solution. AMD said the deployment of the first gigawatt will begin in the first half of next year. 

According to AMD, Anthropic will deploy the GPUs together with AMD EPYC “Venice” CPUs, AMD Pensando networking and ROCm software. This deployment builds on Anthropic’s existing use of AMD Instinct MI355X GPUs.

“We are thrilled to deepen our partnership with Anthropic and deploy AMD Helios at gigawatt scale,” AMD chair and CEO Lisa Su said.

“This collaboration brings together Anthropic’s leadership in frontier AI with the full strength of AMD high-performance computing. Together, we will accelerate AI adoption at scale and establish Helios as a major platform for the next generation of AI infrastructure.”

Engineering collaboration

Additionally, AMD and Anthropic announced they are launching a multi-year engineering collaboration to use Claude to speed up AMD software development. Specifically, AMD will use Claude for AMD Instinct GPUs workloads and to accelerate ROCm software development. 

AMD added that Claude will be broadly adopted by its engineering and product development teams.

“Access to compute is central to keeping Claude at the frontier and meeting demand from our customers,” said Anthropic Co-Founder and Chief Compute Officer Tom Brown.  

“By partnering with AMD across the stack, we are securing the capacity we need and optimising it for training and serving Claude. Running across a diversified range of hardware lets us map the right workloads to the right hardware.”

Anthropic’s agreement with AMD is the latest in a string of recent deals the company has announced this year as it continues to scale its compute power to service Claude. 

In May, the company forged a deal with SpaceX to use all of the compute capacity at SpaceX’s Colossus 1 data centre, giving Anthropic access to more than 300 megawatts of new capacity. Similar deals have also been inked with Amazon, Google and Broadcom.

Additional AMD coverage

• AMD lays down gauntlet to Nvidia with release of Instinct MI455X – and promises giant leap in performance with next year’s MI500 series
• AMD lays out EPYC 9006 plans that could see it surge past Intel this year
• When two giants collide: How AMD and Oracle created breakthrough AI networking technology together
• AMD’s Dr Lise Su announces strong demand for Helios as production begins