Big tech pours into AI

Google and Amazon have each expanded their ties to Anthropic in the same week, turning the Claude maker into a central player in the 2026 artificial intelligence spending boom. (cnbc.com) (aboutamazon.com) Google said on Friday, April 24, that it plans to invest up to $40 billion in Anthropic. CNBC reported the package includes $10 billion immediately and up to $30 billion more if Anthropic hits performance milestones. (cnbc.com) (reuters.com) Amazon made its move earlier, on Monday, April 20, saying it would invest $5 billion right away and up to $20 billion more later. Anthropic said the expanded agreement also commits it to spend more than $100 billion on Amazon Web Services over the next decade. (aboutamazon.com) (anthropic.com) Those agreements are not just venture-style bets. They tie Anthropic’s models to the cloud infrastructure, custom chips and data-center capacity that Google Cloud and Amazon Web Services need to keep full. (reuters.com) (anthropic.com) Anthropic said its Amazon deal is aimed at securing up to 5 gigawatts of new data-center capacity, with roughly 1 gigawatt expected by year-end through Trainium2 and Trainium3 chips. That is utility-scale power for training and serving large AI models. (anthropic.com) (reuters.com) Google’s investment deepens a relationship that already made Google Cloud a major Anthropic supplier, even as the two companies compete to sell AI systems to businesses. Reuters described the pairing as both a partnership and a rivalry in the global AI race. (reuters.com) (nytimes.com) Amazon framed its deal as an enterprise push as well, saying more than 100,000 customers already run Claude models on Amazon Bedrock. Anthropic chief executive Dario Amodei said demand for Claude has grown fast enough that the company needs more infrastructure to keep up. (aboutamazon.com) (anthropic.com) The money also lands in a market where cloud providers are spending at unprecedented levels to secure AI customers and workloads. CNBC reported Amazon said in February it expected about $200 billion in capital expenditures in 2026, with most of that tied to AI infrastructure. (cnbc.com) For Anthropic, the week’s announcements show how model makers are now financed: not only by equity checks, but by long contracts for chips, power and cloud usage. For Google and Amazon, the payoff is a bigger share of the computing bill behind the next wave of enterprise AI. (reuters.com 1) (reuters.com 2)