ANTHROPIC EYES MICROSOFT CHIPS Anthropic is in early talks to rent Azure servers powered by $MSFT’s Maia AI chips, per The Information. This would deepen a relationship that is already moving fast: Microsoft has pledged up to $5B to Anthropic, Anthropic committed $30B of Azure spend, and Microsoft is reselling Claude through Azure. The chip angle matters because Maia is being pitched as cheaper than Nvidia for some inference workloads, not as a frontier training replacement. Anthropic already uses Amazon, Google, and Nvidia chips. Now Microsoft wants Maia in that mix.