The equity component runs in the opposite direction to AMD's landmark deal with OpenAI, which handed the customer warrants for up to roughly 10% of AMD's stock . Here, AMD is putting money into its buyer, becoming both supplier and shareholder.
Anthropic's deployment pairs Instinct MI455X GPUs with EPYC "Venice" CPUs, Pensando networking, and ROCm software inside Helios racks , each of which packs 72 accelerators, 31 TB of HBM4, and up to 2.9 FP4 exaFLOPS of inference compute. The two companies also launched a multi-year engineering collaboration that will use Claude to optimize workloads for Instinct GPUs and speed up ROCm development, while AMD adopts Claude across its engineering and product teams.
"Running across a diversified range of hardware lets us map the right workloads to the right hardware," said Tom Brown, co-founder and chief compute officer at Anthropic, in the press release.
SemiAnalysis reported on Sunday that a YAML configuration file in an AMD senior director's public GitHub repository listed Anthropic as a 'customer' with the maximum 30 priority boost points, the same tier as hyperscale customers, such as Meta. Anthropic wasn't a publicly confirmed AMD customer at the time; its disclosed suppliers were Nvidia, Amazon , and Google . Today’s press release states the Helios deployment "builds on Anthropic's existing use of AMD Instinct MI355X GPUs," the first official confirmation that Claude workloads already run on AMD silicon.
Microsoft will deploy AMD’s Helios rack-scale AI accelerator ‘at scale’ on Azure
Musk's SpaceX has rented out access to its supercomputer's 220,000 Nvidia GPUs and 300 megawatts of AI compute power to rival Anthropic
AMD's Helios MI455X AI platform breaks cover, initial systems use UALink-over-Ethernet interconnects
Anthropic's first AMD gigawatt comes behind two other Helios customers in the queue. OpenAI's first gigawatt of AMD capacity is due in the second half of 2026, and Oracle is due to begin deploying 50,000 MI450 GPUs this quarter.
The 2 gigawatt commitment adds to a compute portfolio that already spans Nvidia GPUs, Amazon's Trainium chips under Project Rainier, 3.5 gigawatts of Google TPU capacity supplied by Broadcom from 2027, and 300 megawatts of Nvidia compute rented from SpaceX's Colossus 1 data center, making AMD roughly the sixth distinct silicon source feeding Claude.
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Reference reading
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- https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/amd-to-supply-anthropic-with-2-gigawatts-of-instinct-mi450-gpus#main
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