Ahead of the Ignite 2025 keynote event, Microsoft today surprised everyone by announcing a new expanded partnership with Anthropic, a leading AI startup and also OpenAI"s rival company. As part of the partnership, Microsoft is going to invest up to $5 billion in Anthropic and also going to serve their models in Azure.
Early this year, Microsoft announced that it will be offering Anthropic"s Claude models on Microsoft 365 Copilot and Copilot Studio as an alternative to OpenAI"s models. However, Anthropic"s Claude model APIs remained exclusive to AWS and Google Cloud platforms.
With this new expanded partnership with Anthropic, the Claude AI model will be made available on Azure, powered by NVIDIA"s GPUs. Microsoft claims that this availability will offer Azure enterprise customers with expanded model choice. Microsoft Foundry will offer all the latest Anthropic"s models: Claude Sonnet 4.5, Claude Opus 4.1, and Claude Haiku 4.5.
As part of this partnership, Anthropic has committed to purchase $30 billion of Azure compute capacity and to contract additional compute capacity up to one gigawatt, which will be powered by NVIDIA Grace Blackwell and Vera Rubin systems.
The key to Microsoft and Anthropic"s partnership is NVIDIA. Until now, Anthropic"s models were running mainly on Amazon"s custom AI accelerators and Google Cloud"s TPUs. Now, Anthropic is working with NVIDIA to optimize their AI models for the best possible performance, efficiency, and TCO on future NVIDIA architectures.
Through this partnership, Anthropic highlighted that Claude is the only frontier model available on all three leading public cloud providers. As part of the partnership, NVIDIA and Microsoft will invest up to $5 billion each in Anthropic.
Watch the video below to know what Anthropic co-founder and CEO Dario Amodei, Microsoft Chairman and CEO Satya Nadella, and NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang think about this new partnership.
Despite this new partnership with Microsoft, Amazon remains Anthropic’s primary cloud provider and training partner. Also, Microsoft mentioned that OpenAI remains its critical AI technology partner as before.