The artificial intelligence (AI) business continues to fuel multimillion-dollar investments. On this occasion, two of the largest companies in the world, Nvidia and Microsoft, announced their commitment to invest up to 15 billion dollars, the equivalent of approximately 12.95 billion euros, in Anthropic, OpenAI’s rival company in the development of artificial intelligence, as the companies announced on Tuesday through a joint statement. According to the agreement, Nvidia will invest 10,000 million, of which 5,000 million from Microsoft.
Millionaire investments, with a volume never seen before, and cross-activities in the artificial intelligence business are fueling the fear of a bubble. Nvidia and Microsoft, Anthropic’s new partners, are also two of the largest investors in OpenAI. Nvidia has in fact committed an investment of 100 billion dollars in start in a strategic alliance concluded in September.
The company founded by Sam Altman also has agreements with AMD and Intel, rivals of each other and competitors of Nvidia. Now, according to Bloomberg, the two tech giants will also enter the capital of Anthropic when this company launches its next round of financing. To close the loop, Anthropic has committed to acquiring $30 billion in computing capacity from Microsoft’s Azure cloud service, according to the joint statement released by both companies this Tuesday.
The AI business is absorbing huge amounts of money. Cross-partnerships between artificial intelligence developers, chip manufacturers and cloud service providers are raising suspicions among investors, who are starting to observe behavior typical of a financial bubble.
Companies at the forefront of artificial intelligence need a lot of computing power to train their advanced algorithms. Companies like Microsoft or Amazon, leaders in cloud computing, offer their servers remotely so that artificial intelligence developers can train their generative language models. And for all this you need cutting-edge chips, which only a handful of companies around the world can provide. Ultimately, a closed ecosystem is created, absorbing more investment than any previous technological revolution in history, including the development of the railroad in the 19th century, the emergence of the automobile in the 20th century, or the arrival of the Internet in the early 2000s.
After the news, Microsoft shares fell by 3.5% and Nvidia by 2.8%, even though the main indices have already woken up with a loss. Analysts have high expectations for Nvidia’s results presentation, which will take place tomorrow, because it will allow them to see whether the investments made are starting to bear fruit.
“Nvidia and Anthropic will collaborate on design and engineering, with the goal of optimizing Anthropic models for the best possible performance, efficiency and total cost of ownership (TCO), as well as optimizing future Nvidia architectures for Anthropic workloads. Anthropic’s computing commitment will initially be up to 1 gigawatt of capacity with NVIDIA Grace Blackwell and Vera Rubin systems,” they note in the statement.
Anthropic welcomes the deal because it brings it closer to Microsoft, which was OpenAI’s strategic partner in the development of ChatGPT, where it has already invested more than $13 billion. However, in recent months, Microsoft and OpenAI have engaged in more open competition, Bloomberg explains.
“We will increasingly be mutual customers: we will use Anthropic’s models, they will use our infrastructure, and we will go to market together,” said Satya Nadella, Microsoft’s chief executive, in a video accompanying the statement. “Of course all of this builds on the alliance we have with OpenAI, which continues to be a key partner for Microsoft,” he adds.
Anthropic was founded in 2021 by former OpenAI employees. Its objective is, unlike other projects, to strengthen the commitment to safety. Its chatbot is called Claude and has established itself as one of the most efficient for programming among developers in sectors such as finance and healthcare.
The company recently raised $13 billion in September, reaching a valuation of $183 billion, and says it has 300,000 enterprise customers, according to Bloomberg calculations.
Like its competitor OpenAI, Anthropic is accelerating its efforts to develop more infrastructure to support the development of artificial intelligence and greater adoption of this technology. Anthropic plans to invest $50 billion in building custom AI data centers in several locations across the United States, including Texas and New York.
Competition between OpenAI and Anthropic has raged in recent months, both in the financial sphere and in the operations themselves. If the start Led by Sam Altman, a few weeks ago it closed a share purchase operation between employees and investors, with a valuation of 500 billion dollars; Anthropic responded with a $13 billion funding round, led by Iconiq, Fidelity and Lightspeed Venture Partners, at a valuation of $189 billion. With these numbers OpenAI is the start most valuable in the world, Anthropic occupies fourth place in the ranking.
Investors’ eyes are focused on the evolution of the two’s accounts start-ups Silicon Valley’s largest AI companies. According to documents cited by Anthropic, it is on track to reach profitability well before its rival OpenAI The Wall Street Journal last week.
According to current plans, Anthropic, which is gaining users in the enterprise space thanks to its chatbots Claude, plans to reach the equalize (break-even point) for the first time in 2028. Furthermore, the start raised its growth forecast to between 13% and 28% for the next three years and expects to generate up to $70 billion in revenue in 2028, up from nearly $5 billion this year, according to a report published by The information.
By contrast, OpenAI expects its operating losses to rise this year to $74 billion, or about three-quarters of its revenue. The red numbers are a consequence of the increase in IT spending, mainly due to the development of infrastructure, with chips and data centers. Additionally, ChatGPT’s creator expects to burn through about 14 times more cash than Anthropic, which is backed by Amazon and Alphabet, before turning a profit in 2030, according to the report cited by the WSJ.
At the same time, OpenAI, which has drawn up a five-year business plan to generate revenue in several areas, expects lower profit margins than its competitor on sales over the next five years.
