Google and Anthropic announce cloud deal worth tens of billions

anthropic and Google officially announced their cloud partnership on Thursday, a deal that gives the artificial intelligence company access to up to one million of Google’s custom-designed Tensor Processing Units, or TPUs.

The deal, worth tens of billions of dollars, is the company’s largest TPU commitment ever and is expected to bring over a gigawatt of AI computing capacity online in 2026.

Industry estimates put the cost of a 1 gigawatt data center at around $50 billion, of which about $35 billion is typically devoted to chips.

While rivals are touting even bigger predictions—among them OpenAI’s 33-gigawatt “Stargate” chief—Anthropic’s move is a quiet power play that comes from execution, not spectacle.

Founded by former OpenAI researchers, the company has consciously adopted a slower, more stable, efficient, diversified and laser-focused ethos on the enterprise market.

The key to Anthropic’s infrastructure strategy is its multi-cloud architecture.

The company’s Claude family of language models runs on Google’s TPUs. Amazon’s custom Trainium chips and Nvidia’s GPUs where each platform is dedicated to specific workloads such as training, inference, and research.

Google told Anthropic that TPUs offer “strong price-performance and efficiency.”

“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,” Anthropic CFO Krishna Rao said in a statement.

Anthropic’s ability to distribute workloads across vendors allows it to fine-tune based on price, performance, and power constraints.

In this model, every dollar of computing extends further than those locked into single-vendor architectures, according to a person familiar with the company’s infrastructure strategy.

For its part, Google also welcomes the partnership.

“Anthropic’s choice to significantly expand TPU usage reflects the strong price-performance and efficiency their teams have seen in TPUs for several years,” Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian said in a statement, citing the company’s seventh-generation “Ironwood” accelerator as part of a maturing portfolio.

The company’s annual revenue rate is now approaching $7 billion, and Claude is empowered More than 300,000 businesses – a staggering 300-fold increase in the last two years. The number of large clients contributing more than $100,000 in revenue each increased nearly sevenfold last year.

The company’s representative coding assistant, Claude Code, generated $500 million in annual revenue in just two months after its launch, which Anthropic claims makes it the “fastest growing product” in history.

As Google powers the next phase of Anthropic’s computing expansion Amazon continues to be its most established partner.

The retail and cloud giant has invested $8 billion in Anthropic to date; That’s more than double the $3 billion in equity that Google has confirmed.

Still, AWS is considered Anthropic’s lead cloud provider, making its impact structural and not just financial.

Custom-built supercomputer for Claude, Known as Project RainierIt runs on Amazon’s Trainium 2 chips. This change is important not only in terms of speed but also in terms of cost: Trainium eliminates the premium margins of other chips, enabling more transactions per dollar spent.

Wall Street is already seeing results.

Rothschild & Co Redburn analyst Alex Haissl estimates that Anthropic added one to two percentage points to AWS’s growth in the fourth quarter of last year and the first quarter of this year, and its contribution is expected to exceed five percentage points in the second half of 2025.

Wedbush’s Scott Devitt previously told CNBC that if Claude becomes a default tool for enterprise developers, that usage will flow directly into AWS revenue; Devitt said he believes this dynamic will drive AWS’s growth “for many years.”

Meanwhile, Google continues to play an important role. In January, the company agreed to make a new $1 billion investment in Anthropic, adding to its previous $2 billion stake and 10% equity stake.

Critically, Anthropic’s multi-cloud approach proved resilient during Monday’s AWS outage, which didn’t impact Claude thanks to its diversified architecture.

Antropik isn’t playing favorites, though. The company has control over model weights, pricing, and customer data and is not exclusive with any cloud provider. This neutral stance could be key as competition among hyperscalers intensifies.

WRISTWATCH: Anthropic’s Mike Krieger talks about the launch of the new model and the race to build real-world AI agents