Anthropic Secures $45 Billion Nvidia Lease Weeks After Massive AMD Compute Commitment

Artificial intelligence developer Anthropic is pursuing a dual-vendor infrastructure strategy, committing tens of billions of dollars across both Nvidia and Advanced Micro Devices platforms to secure compute capacity for its future AI models.

The San Francisco-based startup has agreed to pay $45 billion over six years to lease computing capacity powered by Nvidia's next-generation Vera Rubin chips, as first reported by Bloomberg and Reuters. Under the terms of the deal, Anthropic will rent capacity from a planned 460-megawatt data center campus in West Virginia operated by cloud infrastructure provider Nscale. Operations at the West Virginia site are expected to begin in late 2027. Anthropic declined to comment on the lease arrangement.

The agreement with Nscale follows a separate multi-billion-dollar deal involving AMD hardware finalized just one month earlier. That contract covers the purchase of tens of billions of dollars in servers equipped with AMD’s Instinct MI450 accelerators, representing up to two gigawatts of computing capacity starting in the first half of 2027. AMD also agreed to invest up to $5 billion into Anthropic as specific operational milestones are reached.

Although the two transactions are structured differently—the AMD agreement involves direct server purchases while the Nvidia allocation represents an infrastructure compute lease through Nscale—they demonstrate Anthropic's strategy to avoid single-vendor dependency. By diversifying across both chipmakers, the firm is working to insulate itself against potential supply chain constraints as frontier model training demands expand.

The massive forward infrastructure commitments arrive during a period of rapid revenue growth for the AI startup. Anthropic's annualized revenue run rate topped $65 billion by the end of July, climbing from $47 billion in May. The company has projected annual revenue to reach between $190 billion and $200 billion by 2028, requiring extensive computing infrastructure to be secured years in advance of expected utilization.

The split commitments offer positive signals for both chip suppliers. Securing a two-gigawatt deployment for its MI450 accelerators validates AMD as a major second-source provider for frontier AI workloads. At the same time, the $45 billion Nscale lease confirms that demand for Nvidia's next-generation Vera Rubin architecture remains robust among top-tier AI developers.

Institutional investors have adjusted positions in both chipmakers during the recent quarter, according to data detailed by Yahoo Finance. Hedge fund ownership in AMD grew 23.1 percent during the second quarter, rising from 134 to 165 funds. Over the same period, hedge fund positions in Nvidia expanded 3.2 percent, moving from 277 to 286 funds. As of mid-August, short interest stood at 2.47 percent of float for AMD and 1.23 percent for Nvidia.