AMD stock jumped roughly 12% on Wednesday after Anthropic agreed to deploy up to 2 gigawatts of AMD’s Instinct MI450 GPUs. AMD will also invest up to $5 billion in the Claude maker.

Anthropic is AMD’s third gigawatt-scale AI customer in nine months, after OpenAI and Meta. However, this deal is much cheaper for AMD. That is why Wall Street cheered.

Inside the AMD Anthropic Deal

AMD confirmed the deal in a Wednesday announcement. Anthropic will run AMD’s Helios rack systems. These combine Instinct MI455X GPUs, EPYC “Venice” CPUs, Pensando networking, and ROCm software. The first gigawatt arrives in the first half of 2027.

Anthropic already uses AMD’s older MI355X chips, so the partnership is not new. The two firms will also team up on software. Claude will tune workloads for AMD chips and speed up ROCm. That matters because ROCm still trails Nvidia’s CUDA, the software that keeps most AI labs loyal to Nvidia.

The $5 billion pledge is AMD’s first direct stake in Anthropic. It gets paid out as deployment targets are met. The Wall Street Journal reported the servers are worth tens of billions of dollars.

That fits record AI chip demand this year. AMD chair and CEO Lisa Su said the two engineering teams had worked together for some time.

AMD Stock Rally Tightens the Race With Nvidia

In two days, AMD gained about $85 billion in market value. Its market cap now tops $908 billion. Nvidia also gained about 6%, even after it briefly lost its crown as the world’s most valuable company this month.

Why does the structure matter? AMD gave OpenAI and Meta warrants for up to 160 million shares each. Combined, that is about a fifth of the company. Anthropic got no warrants, just a capped cash stake. Jefferies analyst Blayne Curtis, who has a $615 target on AMD, said the terms would matter more than the win itself.

Anthropic, meanwhile, buys compute from almost everyone. In April, it pledged over $100 billion in AWS spending over 10 years for up to 5 gigawatts of Amazon’s Trainium chips. It also trains on Google’s tensor processing units (TPUs) and Nvidia GPUs. That spending supports the wider semiconductor stocks bull case.

“Access to compute is central to keeping Claude at the frontier and meeting demand from our customers. … Running across a diversified range of hardware lets us map the right workloads to the right hardware,” Tom Brown, Anthropic co-founder and chief compute officer, said in the official statement.

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AMD says Helios shipments remain on track for late 2026. The next test is simple. Can AMD keep winning big AI labs without giving away equity? The answer may decide whether this rally lasts, especially as US chip stocks wobble on China fears.

Source: BeInCrypto