A deal would give Microsoft a win in the race to supply AI companies with custom silicon, where it trails Amazon and Google
Credit: Microsoft
No deal has been finalized, according to CNBC, citing a person familiar with the matter who asked not to be named. The Information first reported the discussions on Thursday.
For Microsoft, closing such an arrangement would signal progress in its effort to compete with Amazon $AMZN and Google $GOOGL, both of which have moved faster to place their custom silicon with AI customers. The Maia 200, unveiled by Microsoft in January as its second-generation AI chip, has so far not been offered to customers through the Azure cloud platform. On the company's April earnings call, Nadella told investors the chip achieves more than 30% better tokens per dollar than other silicon currently in Microsoft's fleet, and noted deployments are already underway at data centers in Arizona and Iowa.
Anthropic has been grappling with a shortage of computing capacity. At a public event earlier this month, co-founder and CEO Dario Amodei openly described what he called "difficulties with compute," CNBC reported. Wider adoption of both the Claude assistant and the Claude Code tool for developers has strained the company's access to computing resources.
The AI startup has been rapidly expanding its chip and compute partnerships. In April, Anthropic agreed to use Amazon Web Services' custom Trainium chips in a 10-year arrangement valued at more than $100 billion. The company also announced plans to use Google's tensor processing unit chips in October. On Wednesday, SpaceX disclosed that Anthropic will pay $1.25 billion per month through May 2029 for computing power.
Nvidia $NVDA GPUs have long served as the backbone of Anthropic's infrastructure for building and running its generative AI models.
The two companies deepened their financial relationship last November, when Microsoft announced a $5 billion investment in Anthropic and Anthropic pledged to direct $30 billion in spending toward Azure. Amazon and Google also count Anthropic among their cloud customers.
Requests for comment sent to both companies went unanswered, CNBC noted.
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