google The companies confirmed Friday that they plan to invest up to $40 billion in Anthropic, as the technology giant ramps up its strategic investments in the artificial intelligence leader.
The deal includes an initial $10 billion from Google, based on Anthropic’s latest valuation of $380 billion. The remaining $30 billion will depend on certain performance milestones.
Bloomberg first reported the deal.
Anthropic said the deal expands on the long-standing partnership between the two companies. Earlier this month, Anthropic secured 5 gigawatts worth of computing capacity as part of an announcement with Google. broadcom It will start being offered online next year. Anthropic may decide to add more gigawatts of computing in the future.
Google provides access to Anthropic’s cloud model through Anthropic’s cloud division. Amazon Web services and microsoft Azure. The company also offers a custom chip called a tensor processing unit (TPU) as an alternative to Nvidia’s graphics processing unit.
Meanwhile, Google’s Gemini competes with Anthropic in the AI models and services market.
The relationship between the two companies dates back to 2023, when Google invested $300 million in AI Labs, taking a roughly 10% stake. A few months later, Google poured in another $2 billion. Prior to Friday’s announcement, Google’s investment in Anthropic reportedly exceeded $3 billion, giving it a 14% stake in the company.
Big tech companies are currently investing tens of billions of dollars in frontier AI labs OpenAI and Anthropic in funding rounds that far exceed their previous investments in startups. Much of that investment comes back in the form of profits.
Anthropic’s latest deal with Google comes as the company works to address the “unavoidable strain” on its infrastructure resulting from increased enterprise, developer, and consumer demand for Claude. OpenAI has recently criticized its biggest rival for not having enough computing power.
Google’s investment appears similar to another deal signed by Anthropic Amazon Just a few weeks ago. The e-commerce giant has agreed to invest $5 billion in the company and up to $20 billion in future investments related to “certain commercial milestones,” according to the release.
“Our users are telling us that Claude is becoming increasingly integral to the way they work, and we need to build the infrastructure to keep up with rapidly growing demand,” Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei said in a statement at the time. “Working with Amazon allows us to continue to advance our AI research while delivering Claude to our customers, including over 100,000 builds on AWS.”
Anthropic was founded in 2021 by a group of researchers and executives who left OpenAI. The company’s AI products, particularly its Claude Code assistant, have exploded in popularity over the past year. Anthropic’s annual revenue exceeded $30 billion.
–CNBC’s Jennifer Elias contributed to this report
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