AMD and Anthropic have signed a major deal covering tens of billions of dollars' worth of artificial-intelligence servers. The agreement strengthens AMD's competitive position against industry leader Nvidia and supplies Anthropic with much-needed computing power.

Under the terms, Anthropic will purchase up to 2 gigawatts of AMD's latest-generation Instinct MI450 chips starting in the first half of 2027. AMD will also invest up to $5 billion in Anthropic—its first check into the AI firm—as certain deployment milestones are met.

"We have very much wanted to be a major part of their infrastructure," AMD Chief Executive Lisa Su said, noting the companies' engineering teams have been working together. Anthropic currently runs workloads across Google's tensor-processing units, Amazon.com's Trainium chips, and Nvidia GPUs.

As part of the deal, Anthropic will buy some AMD chips for its own data centers and lease capacity via other large cloud providers or neoclouds. AMD is also in talks to provide a financial backstop for Anthropic's future data-center leases.