Kolkata: After the fall, the rise. The Infosys stock jumped by well over 4% as news of the IT bellwether entering a collaboration with US AI firm Anthropic to develop and deliver advanced enterprise AI solutions for different sectors such as telecom, financial services, manufacturing and software development spread in the market. Cheerful investors began to invest in the shares that took a heavy beating over the past few days. As a result, at 11:40 am on Tuesday, Feb 17, the Infosys stock was trading at Rs 1,423.20, up Rs 57.60 or nearly 4.30%.
According to reports, the two companies will integrate Anthropic’s Claude models, including Claude Code, with Infosys Topaz AI offerings. They will also set up an Anthropic Center of Excellence the sole purpose of which will be to build and deploy AI agents which will be tailored to industry-specific operations. The rise came after a dramatic meltdown of all IT stocks in India, especially those of the two biggest stocks — Infosys and TCS. The drag was so vicious that the IT index lost a whopping 8.2% in last week between Feb 9 and Feb 13.
“Game changer”
Market analysts described the collaboration between the two companies as a game changer. “The collaboration with Anthropic is a big game changer,” Dharmesh Kant, head of equity research at Cholamandalam Securities, was quoted in the media as saying. The fall in IT stocks in India was preceded by jitters in the IT and tech stocks in the US markets. The contagion quickly spread to India as investors were concerned that AI will gain an overnight advantage over the traditional IT service providers such as TCS and Infosys which depend on manpower to deliver ERP projects. The scare followed launch of a legal AI tool by Anthropic for its Claude AI chatbot.
“The collaboration reflects a shared commitment to ensuring AI drives real transformational value, not just efficiency gains. Together, Infosys and Anthropic aim to help clients reimagine the enterprise operating model by combining deep industry expertise, frontier AI, and engineering scale into one unified approach,” said a company statement.
Second consecutive session of gain
The shares of Indian IT companies jumped on Tuesday. They were actually seen extending the gains for the second consecutive session after last week’s decline. The gain began right from the morning when trade began. Around 12 noon on Tuesday, the Nifty IT ETF gained more than 2.7%. At 9;45 am, the Nifty IT index jumped to 33,423.65. At that time the Infosys shares were up 3% and they picked up momentum later as trade progressed.
Coforge shares rose 2.5%, HCL Tech and Persistent Systems shares increased 2% while TCS, Mphasis, Tech Mahindra, Wipro and LTI Mindtree shares rose by more than 1% in the morning before 10 am.
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