Update October 24: Anthropic has announced that the Google deal worth tens of billions of dollars has been finalized. More than a gigawatt of additional capacity is expected to come online in 2026.
As a result, Anthropic will be running on a large scale on both Nvidia’s GPUs and Amazon Trainium and Google Cloud TPUs. According to the company, this multi-platform approach is important for improving Claude while maintaining strong industrial ties. It also means that Anthropic will be available to as many cloud customers as possible.
Original article, October 22:
Discussions are still in the early stages, but Google and Claude creator Anthropic are considering a cloud agreement worth tens of billions of dollars. This would allow Anthropic to use Google’s AI computing power.
Google, itself an investor in Anthropic, would already see a significant return on its investment under the agreement. It has invested approximately $3 billion in two investment rounds in the AI company. Cloud competitor Amazon/AWS has invested $8 billion in Anthropic, of which $4 billion was committed at the end of last year. There therefore appears to be a tug-of-war between the two hyperscalers to bind Anthropic more closely to themselves. The Claude model series is considered a formidable competitor to both OpenAI’s GPT models and Google’s own Gemini offering.
Profit model
Meanwhile, Anthropic is earning more and more from the use of Claude. CEO Dario Amodei (photo) called his company “the fastest-growing software company in history” this week, with annual revenue growing from $1 billion to $7 billion in the past nine months. As impressive as this amount is, the staggering costs of developing new AI models are once again evident. According to Bloomberg sources, the proposed Google deal is worth tens, and probably close to a hundred, billions. So, real hockey stick growth in revenue will be needed to cover the costs.
The agreement would be good news for Google in any case. In addition to a new source of income, the tech giant is gaining confidence in its own TPUs (Tensor Processing Units), which are essentially AI chips that serve as an alternative to Nvidia’s and AMD’s GPUs. Google Cloud customers can choose between these AI chips for running or developing their models. For AI players such as Anthropic, it is clear that any new power source for running AI workloads is welcome. The same has long been known at OpenAI, which has signed major deals with Oracle and previously Microsoft for AI computing power.
Google is already doing well on the stock market with the news. Shares in parent company Alphabet rose by 3.5 percentage points, while rival Amazon saw a decline of around 2 percent at the time of writing.
Read also: OpenAI signs historic $300 billion deal with Oracle