Anthropic Bet Tens of Billions on AMD. One Month Later, It Signed a $45 Billion Nvidia-Powered Lease

Anthropic Bet Tens of Billions on AMD. One Month Later, It Signed a $45 Billion Nvidia-Powered Lease

Habib Ur Rehman

Thu, August 27, 2026 at 8:52 PM GMT+3 3 min read

• AMD -1.84%
• NVDA +8.70%

Anthropic apparently chose a winner in the AI-chip war between NVDA and AMD, and it's both of them.

Reuters reported on August 26, citing a person familiar with the matter after Bloomberg broke the news, that Anthropic will spend $45 billion over six years to rent Nvidia Vera Rubin computing capacity from Nscale's planned West Virginia campus. The 460-megawatt project is expected to start operating in late 2027. Anthropic declined to comment.

That would be a spectacular win for NVIDIA Corporation (NASDAQ:NVDA), except Anthropic agreed only a month earlier to buy tens of billions of dollars of servers powered by Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMD).

Source: unsplash

This Is a Multivendor Arms Race

The AMD agreement covers up to two gigawatts of Instinct MI450 capacity beginning in the first half of 2027. AMD also agreed to invest as much as $5 billion in Anthropic as milestones are achieved.

The separate $45 billion Nvidia-powered compute lease is not directly comparable with the AMD server agreement. It is a compute-services lease paid to Nscale, not a direct Nvidia chip order. Even so, it shows Anthropic is unwilling to let a huge AMD commitment prevent it from securing Nvidia's next-generation platform.

That diversification matters because Anthropic projects $190 billion to $200 billion of revenue in 2028, while its annual revenue run rate topped $65 billion by the end of July, up from $47 billion in May. Capacity must arrive before demand does, making execution timing increasingly critical.

The Bull and Bear Cases

NVIDIA Corporation (NASDAQ:NVDA) bulls get the clearest message: customers can commit to enormous alternatives while still reserving huge amounts of Vera Rubin capacity. Bears can counter that custom chips and AMD are winning credible workloads, while the $45 billion flows through an infrastructure operator, not directly to Nvidia. Vendor diversification can cap pricing power over time.

Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMD) bulls can finally point to hyperscale volume, not just benchmarks. Two gigawatts could establish MI450 as a real second source and widen its software footprint. The bear case is equally blunt: Anthropic's separate Nvidia-powered commitment shows AMD has not displaced the incumbent, and the rollout starts in 2027.

Hedge Funds Are Bullish on Both

AMD's hedge-fund holder count surged from 134 to 165 in Q2, a 23.1% increase. Nvidia's rose from 277 to 286, up 3.2%. Short interest was only 2.47% of AMD's float and 1.23% of Nvidia's as of August 14.

Anthropic is buying insurance against being capacity-constrained, turning the Nvidia-versus-AMD debate into a spending contest both suppliers can win.

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