AI Bubble Fear: Microsoft & NVIDIA Pour Billions into Anthropic, Fueling Circular Investment

Following its recent revision of the partnership agreement with OpenAI, Microsoft has announced that it will further diversify its AI investment strategy. The company confirmed a planned investment of up to 10 billion USD in Anthropic, one of OpenAI’s chief rivals. At the same time, NVIDIA has pledged an additional 5 billion USD for the developer of the Claude model series.

This trilateral arrangement involves not only substantial capital injections but also a web of cross-commitments, further illuminating the tangled pattern of “circular investment” that has come to characterize the AI industry—and fueling growing concerns that an AI bubble may be forming.

As part of the deal, Anthropic has committed to purchasing 30 billion USD worth of Microsoft Azure cloud-computing capacity and has agreed to secure up to 1 gigawatt (GW) of additional compute resources.

For Microsoft, beyond safeguarding Azure’s revenue pipeline, the more consequential benefit is that customers of Microsoft Foundry—its chip-fabrication and services arm—will gain access to multiple Claude models, including Sonnet 4.5, Opus 4.1, and Haiku 4.5.

Meanwhile, NVIDIA and Anthropic will work together to optimize the performance of the I-model family on NVIDIA hardware, and both companies will collaborate to refine future NVIDIA architectures according to Anthropic’s requirements.

All of this unfolds against the backdrop of Microsoft’s recently updated partnership with OpenAI, which loosened prior exclusivity constraints. The impact of that shift has already become evident: earlier this month, OpenAI signed a 38 billion USD cloud contract with Amazon’s AWS, and just days after Amazon injected an additional 4 billion USD into Anthropic, the company announced that it would adopt AWS’s AI chips.

The situation evokes the famous “Spider-Man pointing” meme. Today’s AI landscape resembles an enormous circle of Spider-Men accusing one another—except in this version, every finger is firing off billions of dollars to support the next Spider-Man in the loop.

Though it may be premature to declare that an AI bubble is about to burst, the industry’s increasingly circular capital flows lend credence to warnings that the market may be overheating. NVIDIA’s upcoming earnings report may offer further clues about what lies ahead.

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