Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei looks on after a meeting with French President Emmanuel Macron during the AI Impact Summit in New Delhi on February 19, 2026.
Ludovic Marin | Afp | Getty Images
Microsoft is in talks to supply its custom artificial intelligence chips to Anthropic, CNBC confirmed on Thursday.
A deal would represent a win for Microsoft, which is behind cloud rivals Amazon and Google when it comes to supplying clients with special-purpose AI silicon. Microsoft announced its second-generation Maia AI chip in January, but has yet to make it available through its Azure cloud. The company did say the Maia 200 processor would run OpenAI’s GPT-5.2 model.
Anthropic has not yet closed a deal with Microsoft over the use of the Maia, said a person familiar with the deal who asked not to be named in order to discuss internal matters. The Information reported on the discussions earlier on Thursday.
Shares of Microsoft were little changed.
In November, Microsoft said it would invest $5 billion in Anthropic, while Anthropic committed to spending $30 billion on Azure. Anthropic also relies on cloud services from Amazon and Google.
Anthropic has had “difficulties with compute,” Dario Amodei, the company’s co-founder and CEO, said at an event earlier this month.
Its Claude assistant and Claude Code tool for AI-assisted programming have become more popular this year, which has made Anthropic’s needs for computing capacity more dire.
On Wednesday, SpaceX disclosed that Anthropic will pay $1.25 billion per month through May 2029 for computing power.
Historically, Anthropic has leaned heavily on graphics processing units from Nvidia to train and run generative AI models. In April, Anthropic said it would use Amazon Web Services’ custom Trainium chips in a 10-year arrangement worth more than $100 billion. Anthropic announced plans to use Google’s tensor processing unit chips in October.
Anthropic declined to comment. Microsoft did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Microsoft’s Maia 200 “offers over 30% improved tokens per dollar, compared to the latest silicon in our fleet,” CEO Satya Nadella said on the company’s earnings call in April.
He said the chips are now running in Microsoft data centers in Arizona and Iowa.
WATCH: Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang: With Anthropic, we are scaling very quickly, we have big plans for them
Correction: In April, Anthropic said it would use Amazon Web Services’ custom Trainium chips in a 10-year arrangement worth more than $100 billion. An earlier version misspelled the name of the chips.
