Google bets $40B on Anthropic

Alphabet said Friday it will invest up to $40 billion in Anthropic, the artificial intelligence company behind Claude. (reuters.com) Anthropic said Google is committing $10 billion now in cash, with another $30 billion available if the startup hits performance targets. The companies disclosed the arrangement on April 24. (bloomberg.com) (cnbc.com) The initial investment values Anthropic at $350 billion, according to Anthropic, matching the valuation cited in reports on the deal. Anthropic said the money will support a “significant expansion” of its computing capacity. (bloomberg.com) (techrepublic.com) Anthropic sells Claude as a rival to OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s own Gemini, but it also depends on cloud providers and specialized chips to train and run those models. Reuters described Google and Anthropic as both partners and rivals in the AI race. (reuters.com) That tension has become a business model. Google gets a larger financial stake in a fast-growing model maker, and Anthropic gets cash plus access to the computing infrastructure that has become the main bottleneck in AI. (nytimes.com) (cnbc.com) The deal lands days after Amazon said it intended to invest up to $25 billion more in Anthropic. Anthropic has already built deep ties with Amazon Web Services as well as Google Cloud. (reuters.com) (techcrunch.com) Google has backed Anthropic before. The New York Times reported that Google had already invested more than $3 billion in the startup before this new commitment. (nytimes.com) Anthropic’s last big fundraising round was announced on February 12, when it said it raised $30 billion in Series G funding at a $380 billion post-money valuation. Friday’s Google deal uses a $350 billion valuation for the new tranche. (anthropic.com) (bloomberg.com) For Google, the bet is less about one app than about where Claude runs. For Anthropic, it is another sign that frontier AI companies are now raising money and compute in the same deal. (reuters.com) (techrepublic.com)