Anthropic is at the heart of the latest billion-dollar circular AI investment bonanza

It wouldn't be a week of tech news without more circular exchanges of billions of dollars between AI firms. This time around, it's a $45 billion back-scratching session involving Microsoft, Anthropic, and Nvidia, announced during Redmond's Ignite conference.

The three firms shared news of the deal with the publication of a joint press release on Tuesday, reporting Anthropic's commitment to invest $30 billion with Microsoft to get a new bundle of Nvidia-powered Azure compute capacity. That's still not enough to get the Claude maker to 1 GW of Azure compute, the addition of which the press release said will be included in the contract for future expansion. 

With Nvidia and Microsoft standing to make plenty on Anthropic's Azure investment, which will naturally require Microsoft to purchase additional Nvidia chips, the two companies decided to reward the Claude-maker. The AI arms dealer and house of ...