AMD and Anthropic, Deal Done: 5 Billion Dollars and Abundant MI450 Instinct GPUs to Boost Claude

AMD and Anthropic have announced a strategic partnership. The agreement includes the deployment of AMD Instinct MI450 GPUs for a total capacity of up to 2 gigawatts, integrated within AMD's Helios rack-scale solutions. The first gigawatt of capacity is expected to become operational in the first half of 2027.

Specifically, Anthropic will use Helios configurations based on MI455X Instinct GPUs, part of the MI450 family, paired with EPYC "Venice" processors, networking components from Pensando, and the ROCm software stack. This infrastructure is specifically designed for training and inference workloads on large models and will complement Anthropic's current use of the earlier generation MI355X Instinct GPUs.

In addition to the hardware component, the two companies have initiated a multi-year engineering collaboration that includes employing the Claude model to optimize workloads on Instinct GPUs and accelerate the development of the ROCm software stack, AMD's alternative to NVIDIA's CUDA. Simultaneously, AMD has announced its intention to extend the adoption of Claude to its engineering and product development teams.

On the financial side, AMD has committed to making a strategic equity investment in Anthropic of up to $5 billion, with the disbursement planned for the future without any further timeline specified in the official communications. "We are excited to deepen our partnership with Anthropic and deploy Helios at a gigawatt scale," said Lisa Su, president and CEO of AMD, emphasizing how the collaboration combines Anthropic's position in developing cutting-edge AI models with AMD's high-performance computing capabilities.

Tom Brown, co-founder and chief compute officer of Anthropic, highlighted that access to computing is a central element in keeping Claude competitive and meeting customer demand, adding that hardware diversification allows the company to allocate workloads to the most suitable platform in each case.

In recent months, AMD had already signed a deal with OpenAI, Anthropic's direct competitor, which included issuing a warrant for the purchase of up to 160 million shares of AMD's common stock, corresponding to about 10% of the company's capital, with maturation conditions linked to both hardware implementation volumes and AMD's stock performance.

For Anthropic, the deal with AMD represents yet another piece of an infrastructure expansion strategy initiated earlier this year. In previous months, the company acknowledged that the increasing demand for Claude-based models and products had generated pressure deemed "inevitable" on its infrastructure, impacting service reliability and performance, especially during peak usage phases.

Anthropic had thus concluded a multi-year agreement with Amazon and a partnership for multi-gigawatt computing capacity with Google and Broadcom. Subsequently, it was also announced that an agreement with SpaceX, Elon Musk's aerospace company, was in place for the use of the entire computing capacity of the Colossus 1 data center. Anthropic is also in preliminary negotiations for renting computing capacity from Meta.