Google, Anthropic Discuss Expanding AI Partnership with Multibillion-Dollar Cloud Deal
The generative AI model maker is said to be negotiating the mega deal with Google, deepening a partnership that dates back to its founding in 2021
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Anthropic, the San Francisco–based generative AI startup founded by a group of former OpenAI researchers, is in talks with Google over a multibillion dollar worth of computing power, as per a Bloomberg report.
The discussions, according to people familiar with them, center on Google’s cloud division and its proprietary tensor processing units (TPUs) which are silicon chips designed to quicken the machine learning workload. The arrangement, still in its early stages, would deepen an already existing partnership: Google is both an investor in Anthropic and one of its principal cloud providers.
News of the talks was enough to stir the markets as Google’s shares rose more than three and a half percent in extended trading while Amazon, which also counts Anthropic as both an investment and a cloud client, slipped a bit.
Anthropic’s ambitions, like its peers’, are costly. Its Claude models, named perhaps in homage to an earlier generation of rationalists, compete directly with OpenAI’s GPTs. Training and maintaining these systems requires immense computing infrastructure, the sort that only a handful of companies—Google, Amazon, Microsoft—are capable of providing.
The startup, now valued at roughly $183 billion dollars following a recent $13 billion funding round led by Iconiq Capital and joined by Fidelity and Lightspeed Venture Partners, has been on an extraordinary ascent. It is reportedly in early talks with Abu Dhabi’s MGX for additional funding, a sign that the global race for AI supremacy has become not just a Silicon Valley drama but an international one.
Google has already invested around three billion dollars in Anthropic—two billion last year, and another billion earlier this year. Amazon has pledged eight. Anthropic has relied on Google Cloud since its founding in 2021 and was among the first to experiment with Google’s AI chips when they became available in 2023.
