Anjney Midha, an early Anthropic investor and former general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, has launched Amp, a $1.3 billion venture fund that combines venture capital with direct access to AI computing power for startups and academic researchers.
The fund's core thesis rests on a simple constraint: frontier AI development is bottlenecked by chip availability, not money. Midha, 34, argued in an Aug. 21 statement that traditional venture firms failed to recognize this dynamic during the AI boom, missing both the opportunity and the competitive advantage of securing compute supply.
Midha is retaining his board seats from his a16z tenure while building Amp, signaling continued conviction in his prior investments. He also remains a backer of Anthropic.
Amp targets early-stage frontier AI companies and researchers with both financial backing and the hardware they need to train and deploy large models. The bundled model attempts to solve a real friction point: startups with strong technical teams often cannot access sufficient GPUs or TPUs at reasonable costs, forcing them into either extended waitlists with cloud providers or prohibitive spot-market pricing.
Midha cited Stripe's recent acquisition of OpenRouter—a routing layer for LLM API access—as evidence that infrastructure plays are capturing strategic value in the emerging agentic internet. His point: whoever controls the pipes controls the pace of innovation downstream.
The fund positions itself as a differentiator in a crowded AI venture market. Pure capital is abundant; reliable, on-demand compute is not. If Amp can secure long-term GPU allocations at favorable rates and pass those savings to portfolio companies, it creates a defensible advantage for the fund and a material cost advantage for its bets.
