Google plans up to $40 billion Anthropic investment

Google plans to invest up to $40 billion in Anthropic, expanding its ties to the Claude maker as demand for AI computing grows.

Google plans to invest up to $40 billion in Anthropic, the companies confirmed Friday, in a major new commitment to one of the leading artificial intelligence labs as large technology companies race to finance and supply the infrastructure behind frontier AI systems.

The agreement includes an initial $10 billion investment from Google at Anthropic’s latest valuation of $380 billion. Another $30 billion could follow if certain performance milestones are met, according to the captured report. Bloomberg first reported the deal.

Anthropic said the agreement builds on a long-running partnership with Google. The investment comes as Anthropic faces growing demand for Claude, its family of AI models and products, and as the company works to expand the computing capacity needed to serve enterprise, developer and consumer users.

The deal underscores the increasingly intertwined relationships among AI model developers and the cloud companies that fund, host and sometimes compete with them. Google makes Anthropic’s Claude models available through its cloud business, which competes with Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure. Google also offers custom tensor processing units, or TPUs, as an alternative to Nvidia graphics processors for AI workloads.

At the same time, Google is not merely a supplier. Its Gemini models compete with Anthropic’s Claude in the market for AI tools and services, making the investment part of a broader strategy in which major tech companies are backing outside AI labs while continuing to develop their own systems.

Google’s relationship with Anthropic dates to 2023, when it invested $300 million in the startup for a stake of about 10%. It later added another $2 billion. Before Friday’s announcement, Google’s investment in Anthropic had exceeded $3 billion, and it reportedly owned a 14% stake in the company.

Anthropic has also recently expanded its compute and funding relationships beyond Google. Earlier this month, the company secured 5 gigawatts of computing capacity through an announcement with Google and Broadcom, with capacity expected to begin coming online next year. The company could add more gigawatts of compute in the future.

The new Google pact appears similar in structure to a recent agreement between Anthropic and Amazon. Amazon invested $5 billion and agreed to invest up to $20 billion more in the future, tied to certain commercial milestones, according to a release cited in the source material.

Anthropic, founded in 2021 by researchers and executives who left OpenAI, has grown quickly as its Claude products gained traction, including its Claude Code assistant. Its annualized revenue has topped $30 billion, according to the captured report.

The remaining question is how quickly Anthropic can turn the promised capital and computing commitments into usable capacity. The next milestones to watch are whether the additional Google investment is triggered and how soon new compute resources come online for Claude customers.