Photo: EPA
Google will invest more than $10 billion if performance targets are met.
Shortly after Amazon announced a $25 billion investment in AI developer Anthropic, Google also agreed to a new funding round and could invest up to $40 billion. The initial tranche will amount to $10 billion, with an additional $30 billion to be provided if Anthropic meets specified performance benchmarks, Bloomberg reports.
Anthropic confirmed that Google will invest $10 billion in cash. An additional $30 billion may follow if the company achieves the agreed targets.
The deal also предусматривает a significant expansion of computing capacity for Anthropic. Google Cloud will provide the AI developer with 5 gigawatts of computing power over the next five years, with several more gigawatts to follow later. In recent months, Anthropic has been rapidly increasing its funding amid the success of Claude Code—an AI agent that helps developers accelerate software creation. The service has quickly gained popularity among engineers in Silicon Valley, including within Google itself.
This week, the company also announced another $5 billion in initial investment from Amazon, valuing it at $350 billion. Additionally, in February, Anthropic raised $30 billion, and investors now estimate its potential valuation at $800 billion or more.
Anthropic is one of Google’s largest clients in cloud services and specialized chips, including tensor processing units (TPUs), which are considered a major alternative to Nvidia solutions in AI computing. At the same time, Anthropic and Google remain direct competitors in the race to develop Artificial General Intelligence—systems capable of performing any task at or above human level. According to Bloomberg, Google’s leadership is increasingly concerned about Anthropic’s strong position in the AI coding market, where Claude Code is currently seen as a leading solution.
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei previously worked as an AI researcher at Google. He founded the company in 2021 together with a group of former employees from OpenAI, the developer of ChatGPT.
According to Bloomberg, last year Google had already committed to supplying Anthropic with up to one million TPU chips as part of a deal worth tens of billions of dollars. At that time, the corporation had already invested around $3 billion in the startup. Bloomberg analysts have raised concerns about so-called “circular deals,” where major tech companies simultaneously invest in AI startups while also selling them cloud infrastructure and chips.
At the same time, Anthropic’s future is not without risks. The company is involved in legal disputes after the Pentagon identified it as a potential supply chain risk due to restrictions on the use of its technology in mass surveillance and autonomous weapons.
