(Image credit: Anthropic, AMD) AMD will deploy up to 2 gigawatts of Instinct MI450 Series GPUs for Anthropic and make a strategic equity investment of up to $5 billion in the Claude developer; the companies have announced in a joint press release . The first gigawatt is scheduled to come online in the first half of 2027 in AMD Helios rack-scale systems, and the same announcement confirms for the first time that Anthropic already runs AMD's current-generation MI355X GPUs. Go deeper with TH Premium: AI and data centers The equity component runs in the opposite direction to AMD's landmark deal with OpenAI, which handed the customer warrants for up to roughly 10% of AMD's stock . Here, AMD is putting money into its buyer, becoming both supplier and shareholder. Anthropic's deployment pairs Instinct MI455X GPUs with EPYC "Venice" CPUs, Pensando networking, and ROCm software inside Helios racks , each of which packs 72 accelerators, 31 TB of HBM4, and up to 2.9 FP4 exaFLOPS of inference compute.…