Google, Anthropic Announce Cloud Deal Worth Tens of Billions
(Bloomberg) — Alphabet Inc.’s Google will supply up to 1 million custom AI chips to Anthropic PBC; It’s a deal worth tens of billions of dollars that deepens its partnership with the fast-growing artificial intelligence startup.
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The arrangement announced Thursday gives Anthropic much more computing capacity while strengthening Google’s position as both a major investor and a key infrastructure provider in the race to power big AI models.
Google’s tensor processing units, or TPUs, which are specially designed chips that accelerate machine learning workloads, are scheduled to be deployed in 2026 and will bring more than a gigawatt of capacity online in a relatively short period of time, Google said in a statement. The deal is among the largest commitments yet in the AI hardware arms race and underscores the rising cost of developing cutting-edge AI systems that require massive computing power to train and run large language models.
Google declined to comment on how Anthropic plans to pay for TPU access. Anthropic did not respond to a request for comment.
“Anthropic and Google have a long-standing partnership, and this latest expansion will help us continue to scale up the computing we need to define the boundaries of AI,” Krishna Rao, Anthropic’s chief financial officer, said in a statement.
By leveraging Google’s TPUs, Anthropic gains access to one of the most advanced chip infrastructures outside Nvidia Corp.’s offerings, reducing its reliance on scarce and costly GPUs. The company, Amazon.com Inc. The move to expand its partnership with Google, the No. 3 cloud provider behind Microsoft Corp. and Microsoft Corp., also signals Google’s confidence in proprietary AI technology. Shares of Amazon, which is both a major investor in Anthropic and one of its main cloud providers, fell after Bloomberg first reported deal discussions on Tuesday, while shares of Google rose.
Google has already invested nearly $3 billion in Anthropic, with $2 billion in 2023 and $1 billion earlier this year. Amazon, meanwhile, has committed up to $8 billion and is supplying the AI startup with its own custom chips through Amazon Web Services. Anthropic relies on both companies’ cloud services to train and deploy its Claude family of large language models that compete with OpenAI’s GPT series and Google’s Gemini AI systems.
