Anthropic Poaches Microsoft Executive to Lead Infrastructure

(Bloomberg) -- Anthropic PBC has hired a senior leader from Microsoft Corp. to lead its push to establish the infrastructure needed to support growing adoption of its artificial intelligence services.

Eric Boyd will serve as head of infrastructure at Anthropic, according to a post on his LinkedIn Tuesday. "AI is accelerating at an incredible pace," he wrote. "The impact of Claude Code in the last 6 months, and particularly the last two months, just shows the power of what is possible."

Anthropic has seen strong growth in demand for its AI products, including Claude Code, which helps streamline the process of writing and debugging software. More recently, the company has struggled at times to keep its services online after what it described as "unprecedented demand" from everyday users, as well as business customers.

The company is working to build additional cloud computing capacity to meet that usage, including committing to spend $50 billion to build AI data centers in the US. By comparison, rival OpenAI has said it plans to spend about $600 billion on infrastructure for AI by 2030.

Boyd previously oversaw Microsoft's AI platform, enabling deployment of large language models by both customers and internal teams. He reported to Executive Vice President Jay Parikh and oversaw about 1,500 workers, according to a recent organizational chart seen by Bloomberg. Prior to his 16 years at Microsoft, he held leadership roles at Yahoo.

Microsoft didn't immediately respond to a request for comment. Boyd's planned hiring was previously reported by tech outlet Newcomer.

"His experience leading infrastructure at enterprise scale will help ensure we can meet record demand from customers around the world," wrote Rahul Patil, Anthropic's chief technology officer, on LinkedIn.

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