Anthropic snags Microsoft exec as new infrastructure chief

• Anthropic poached a key Microsoft AI executive

• The move comes as it launches a $50 billion infrastructure push

• Anthropic's revenue run rate just hit $30 billion, beating OpenAI

AI titan Anthropic made a key hire this week, appointing longtime Microsoft executive Eric Boyd as its new Head of Infrastructure. Boyd's new role will see him focus on building and scaling Anthropic's AI infrastructure for both research and product development, CTO Rahul Patil said in a LinkedIn post. "His experience leading infrastructure at enterprise scale will help ensure we can meet record demand from customers around the world," Patil wrote.

Indeed, Boyd has plenty of experience building infrastructure for large language models like Anthropic's Claude, having spent the past decade-plus as president of Microsoft's Azure AI Platform. The platform underpins Microsoft's Foundry AI developer portal as well as its Foundry IQ toolset.

"AI is accelerating at an incredible pace, and the impact of Claude Code in the last 6 months, and particularly the last two months, just shows the power of what is possible. Bringing Powerful AI to the world in a way that brings the benefits to everyone will be so important, and I can't think of a better place to make this happen.

The move to poach Boyd comes as Anthropic hustles to keep pace with rival OpenAI and less than six months after the company announced a plan to spend $50 billion to build new data centers in the U.S. Initial facilities are slated for Texas and New York.

But Anthropic isn't just building its own compute, it's also buying it. Shortly before Boyd's appointment was announced, Anthropic expanded its compute partnership with Google to secure "multiple gigawatts of next-generation TPU capacity that we expect to come online starting in 2027."

At the same time, Anthropic revealed its annual revenue run rate has already topped $30 billion, with that figure up more than 3x from $9 billion at the end of 2025. That compares to an estimated revenue run rate of $25 billion for OpenAI.