Microsoft aims to advance its AI infrastructure significantly by discussing the supply of Anthropic chips

Microsoft is in talks with Anthropic to provide them with Maia AI chips as the need for advanced computer infrastructure grows around the world.

Microsoft is talking to AI startup Anthropic about supplying its custom-built AI chips. This could make the tech giant stronger in the AI infrastructure market, which is becoming more competitive.

These discussions, disclosed on Thursday, represent a significant advancement for Microsoft as it seeks to compete with Amazon and Google in providing advanced AI chips to large customers.

In January, Microsoft showed off its second-generation Maia AI chip, but the company hasn’t made it available to the public through its Azure cloud platform yet. However, the company confirmed that the Maia 200 chip would power OpenAI’s GPT-5.2 model.

A person with knowledge of the situation said that Anthropic and Microsoft had not yet reached a deal on how to use the Maia chips. The first news about the talks came from The Information on Thursday.

A few months ago, in November, Microsoft said it would invest $5 billion in Anthropic, and the AI company promised to spend $30 billion on Microsoft’s Azure cloud infrastructure. Even though the companies are working together, Anthropic still uses many computer services from both Amazon and Google.

Recently, Dario Amodei, co-founder and CEO of Anthropic, admitted that the company is putting more pressure on its computer resources because of the high demand for its AI goods.

This month, Amodei said at an event, “We’ve had problems with compute.”

Anthropic’s Claude AI assistant and Claude Code writing tool have become very popular this year, which has made the company need a lot more computing power.

As another sign of how big its infrastructure needs are, SpaceX said on Wednesday that Anthropic will pay $1.25 billion a month for computer power until May 2029.

Anthropic has historically used a lot of Nvidia graphics processing units to train and run its generative AI models.

In April, Anthropic also said it would use special Trainium chips from Amazon Web Services as part of a deal worth more than $100 billion over 10 years. The company also said in October that it would use Google’s tensor processing unit chips as part of its plan to build up its AI infrastructure.

Microsoft did not reply right away to requests for comment, and Anthropic did not want to say anything about the reported talks.

In April, during Microsoft’s earnings call, CEO Satya Nadella talked about how the company’s Maia computers were making things run faster.

“Compared to the newest chip in our fleet, Maia 200 offers over 30% better tokens per dollar,” Nadella said.

At the moment, the chips are working in Microsoft data centers in Arizona and Iowa, he said.