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 [1]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 Windows are tossing in their own Anthropic investments of up to $10 billion and $5 billion, respectively, as part of the circular deal.

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While the press release put a number on the Microsoft side of the deal, the financial benefit to Nvidia was left undefined. That said, the trio did say that Anthropic's compute commitment would be for up to one gigawatt of compute capacity derived from Nvidia's [3]Grace Blackwell and [4]Vera Rubin systems, and 1 GW requires a lot of chips.

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Along with Microsoft's need to purchase a bunch of Nvidia chips, the three-way deal will also see Anthropic and Nvidia collaborate on designing and engineering future Nvidia architectures for Anthropic workloads.

Anthropic models are now available in public preview on Microsoft Foundry as part of the deal, Anthropic [7]said in an accompanying release on Tuesday. Anthropic's presence in Microsoft 365 is being expanded as well, with [8]Agent Mode in Excel now offering an option to use Claude alongside ChatGPT.

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"This partnership will make Claude the only frontier model available on all three of the world's most prominent cloud services," the trio congratulated itself.

While Anthropic is clearly extending its cloud footprint into other managed services, the company noted in a footnote to [10]its own copy of the joint press statement that Amazon Web Services "remains Anthropic's primary cloud provider and training partner."

Anthropic's continued prioritization of its Amazon relationship echoes OpenAI's own changed relationship with Microsoft. Since the AI giant has [11]turned into a for-profit firm , it has done more to [12]separate itself from Redmond.

[13]AI bubble to deflate as enterprises defer spending to 2027

[14]AI bubble inflates Microsoft CEO pay to $96.5M

[15]AI investment is the only thing keeping the US out of recession

[16]AI's trillion dollar deal wheel bubbling around Nvidia, OpenAI

Even with that separation, and a [17]$38 billion agreement with AWS to expand its footprint at another hyperscaler, Microsoft still owns a 27 percent stake in OpenAI, which [18]continues to rely on it for the bulk of its computing.

Likewise, this Microsoft-Anthropic-Nvidia trio is just the latest in a string of tech companies [19]throwing billions at each other for the promise of more AI computing resources, though this deal pales in comparison to some of the other mega commitments.

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OpenAI reportedly inked a [21]$300 billion cloud compute contract with Oracle in September, which is far more than the yet-to-turn-a-profit firm has on the books. Oracle needs [22]borrow $25 billion a year for the next four years to construct the computing infrastructure OpenAI has asked for, according to analyst estimates.

Tuesday's Anthropic deal is likely to add further fuel to the belief we're in the midst of an AI bubble: [23]According to sources close to the deal that spoke with CNBC, Anthropic's agreement with Microsoft and Nvidia has pumped the company's valuation to around $350 billion, just two months after Anthropic announced it had completed a Series F funding round that valued it at $183 billion.

That's nearly double the valuation in two months – quite the leap. But as long as [24]investors keep buying the dream , everything's alright forever. ®

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[1] https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2025/11/18/microsoft-nvidia-and-anthropic-announce-strategic-partnerships/

[2] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/aiml&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=2&c=2aRz6hYMGU0N8tCw8_Oz7_QAAAJA&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D2%26raptor%3Dcondor%26pos%3Dtop%26test%3D0

[3] https://www.theregister.com/2025/10/13/nvidia_gb10_spark/

[4] https://www.theregister.com/2025/03/19/nvidia_charts_course_for_600kw/

[5] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/aiml&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44aRz6hYMGU0N8tCw8_Oz7_QAAAJA&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0

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[7] https://www.anthropic.com/news/claude-in-microsoft-foundry

[8] https://www.theregister.com/2025/09/29/microsoft_vibe_working_office/

[9] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/aiml&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44aRz6hYMGU0N8tCw8_Oz7_QAAAJA&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0

[10] https://www.anthropic.com/news/microsoft-nvidia-anthropic-announce-strategic-partnerships

[11] https://www.theregister.com/2025/10/28/openai_simplifies_corporate_structure_into/

[12] https://www.theregister.com/2025/10/24/openai_chatgpt_company_knowledge/

[13] https://www.theregister.com/2025/10/28/forrester_ai_spending/

[14] https://www.theregister.com/2025/10/22/microsoft_nadella_pay/

[15] https://www.theregister.com/2025/10/24/ai_investment_us_recession/

[16] https://www.theregister.com/2025/11/04/the_circular_economy_of_ai/

[17] https://www.theregister.com/2025/11/03/openai_inks_38b_deal_with_aws/

[18] https://www.theregister.com/2025/11/12/openai_spending_report/

[19] https://www.theregister.com/2025/11/03/tech_firms_continue_to_burn/

[20] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/aiml&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33aRz6hYMGU0N8tCw8_Oz7_QAAAJA&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0

[21] https://www.theregister.com/2025/09/11/openai_reportedly_on_the_hook/

[22] https://www.theregister.com/2025/09/29/oracle_ai_debt/

[23] https://www.cnbc.com/2025/11/18/anthropic-ai-azure-microsoft-nvidia.html

[24] https://www.theregister.com/2025/10/03/ai_bubble_watch_markets/

[25] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/