AMD and Anthropic have signed the deal that Wall Street had only been speculating about a day earlier: an agreement worth "tens of billions of dollars" for AI chips, according to the Wall Street Journal. Anthropic will buy up to 2 gigawatts of AMD's newest Instinct MI450 chips starting in the first half of 2027, and AMD will invest as much as $5 billion back into Anthropic once certain deployment milestones are hit. The two companies are also discussing having AMD provide a financial backstop for some of Anthropic's future data-center leases, a structure similar to arrangements Nvidia and other chipmakers have used to help AI labs finance the buildout of new facilities. The announcement lands one day after a Haitong International analyst note, relayed by semiconductor watcher Jukan, had raised AMD's price target to $640 partly on the expectation that an Anthropic deal would eventually be announced and could be larger than AMD's existing agreements with Meta and OpenAI. AMD chief executive Lisa Su also separately described an engineering collaboration in which AMD will use Anthropic's Claude models to help improve its chip designs. For AMD, locking in a major buyer at this scale is central to its push to close the gap with Nvidia in AI accelerators, and for Anthropic, it diversifies chip supply beyond Nvidia at a moment when GPU capacity across the industry remains tight.
Why it matters · A formal, priced deal is different from analyst speculation: 2 gigawatts of committed chip demand plus a $5 billion AMD investment gives Anthropic a real alternative to Nvidia and gives AMD a marquee customer to point to heading into its August 4 earnings, while the proposed lease backstop shows chipmakers are now underwriting AI labs' infrastructure bets directly.
Worth asking · AMD just converted "the market expects a deal" into an actual signed, multi-billion dollar chip and investment agreement with Anthropic. Does this validate AMD as a real second source to Nvidia, or is the backstop financing a sign that AI capex is starting to need more creative funding to keep growing?