AMD shares jumped roughly 12% on Wednesday after the company announced a major deal with AI startup Anthropic. The agreement includes up to $5 billion in investment and a commitment from Anthropic to deploy up to 2 gigawatts of AMD's Instinct MI455X GPUs. The stock's two-day surge added about $85 billion to AMD's market value, pushing its market cap above $908 billion.
A Third Gigawatt-Scale Customer
Anthropic is AMD's third customer to commit to a gigawatt-scale deployment in the past nine months, following OpenAI and Meta. The first gigawatt deployment is expected in the first half of 2026. The deal marks a significant win for AMD as it tries to chip away at Nvidia's dominance in the AI chip market. Nvidia also gained about 6% on Wednesday after briefly losing its crown as the world's most valuable company.
No Warrants, Just Cash
Unlike the deals with OpenAI and Meta, which included warrants for up to 160 million shares each — roughly a fifth of the company — Anthropic received no warrants. Instead, AMD is taking a capped cash stake, its first direct investment in Anthropic. Jefferies analyst Blayne Curtis said the terms of the deal matter more than the win itself. The servers involved are worth tens of billions of dollars, according to The Wall Street Journal.
The Hardware Behind the Deal
The deployment will use AMD's Helios rack systems, which combine Instinct MI455X GPUs, EPYC 'Venice' CPUs, Pensando networking, and ROCm software. Anthropic already uses AMD's older MI355X chips, and the partnership isn't new. Under the deal, Anthropic will tune its Claude workloads for AMD chips and help speed up the ROCm software stack, which still trails Nvidia's CUDA in maturity.
A Crowded AI Chip Market
Anthropic also has deals with AWS — worth over $100 billion over 10 years for up to 5 gigawatts of Trainium chips — as well as Google TPUs and Nvidia GPUs. Tom Brown, Anthropic co-founder, said access to compute is central to keeping Claude at the frontier. AMD says Helios shipments remain on track for late 2026. The broader US chip sector is wobbling on China fears, but AMD's deal shows the intense demand for AI infrastructure.
