Anthropic says AI is eroding Nvidia’s CUDA lead, cutting an AMD chip switch from months to three days

Anthropic claims it has broken free of its Nvidia dependence with a multi-chip strategy. The company says it ported its own AI model, Claude, to AMD GPUs in just three days, with almost no human intervention.

Nvidia’s biggest competitive edge is the combination of hardware and software, specifically CUDA, the software ecosystem that locks developers into Nvidia chips. Porting AI models to other chip architectures takes so much effort that many companies won’t even try. Anthropic now claims in an investor presentation that it has solved this problem using AI itself. According to Tom Brown, co-founder and Chief Compute Officer at Anthropic, the company now trains and runs Claude on all four major chip families. Anthropic made an “unconventional bet” on a multi-chip strategy early on, at a time when most of the industry considered the effort not worth it. Each chip needs its own custom software and inference stack, which is expensive and time-consuming. But Anthropic has been investing in this work for years and has since become “incredibly good” at it, Brown says.Ad The company’s most concrete test came with AMD GPUs. Until now, bringing up a new chip platform kept dozens of engineers busy for months. This year, Anthropic used AMD GPUs for the first time and let its own frontier model, Mythos, do the work. According to Anthropic, Claude was running on AMD after just three days, with almost no human intervention. The model ported or wrote nearly 100 percent of the kernels itself.Ad If these figures are accurate, the software overhead, long considered Nvidia’s strongest competitive advantage, would shrink dramatically because of AI. Companies could switch more easily between chip providers and pick the most affordable or readily available option. In a compute market where supply is tight, a multi-chip approach lets companies focus on the best price-performance ratio, regardless of the vendor. Some chips are better for training, while others are better for inference. And because of its dominance in the AI chip market, Nvidia currently enjoys a margin of more than 70 percent, which is unusually high for hardware.Ad Anthropic treats compute from different vendors, chip architectures, and locations as one interchangeable pool.