Google plans to invest up to $40B in Anthropic

Context: a few weeks ago, Anthropic signed a deal to buy "multiple gigawatts of next-generation TPU capacity" from Google and Broadcom [1]. There have been several previous deals, too.

Some people call this sort of thing a "circular deal", but perhaps a better way to think of it is as a very large-scale version of vendor financing? The simple version of vendor financing is when a vendor gives a retailer time to pay for goods they purchased for resale. This is effectively a loan that's backed by the retailer's ability to resell the goods. There's a possibility that the retailer goes broke and doesn't pay, but the vendor has insight into how well the retailer is doing, so they know if they're a good risk.

Similarly, Google likely knows quite a lot about Anthropic because Anthropic buys computing services from Google for resale. They're making an equity investment rather than a loan, but the money will be coming back to Google, assuming Anthropic's sales continue to rise as fast as they have been.

Also, if you own Google stock, some small part of that is an investment in Anthropic?

[1] https://www.anthropic.com/news/google-broadcom-partnership-c...

I plan on investing $20 per month into Anthropic as well.

I think the subtext of the last few weeks is the Anthropic was becoming severely capacity constrained (or approaching that). They seem to have had to sign two somewhat adverse contracts with Amazon and Google in short succession. suddenly model quality is back up again.

It feels like the market is full Wiley Coyote on frontier model makers, and I like Anthropic's B2B business model.

But all progress points to a commodification of foundation models--Google first named it as "we have no moat, neither does anyone else." So there must be some secondary play driving this, right? Hardware sales? Hedging for search ad revenue?

Still feels mispriced. I think asset inflation leaves too much money desperate for the Next Big Thing.

It feels like Anthropic is everybody's insurance policy against someone else winning the AI race. So you have Amazon, Google, Microsoft basically every major tech company pushing their own tech hard but simultaneously ensuring they have a survival level stake in Anthropic if they can't build or acquire their way to stay at frontier level performance themselves.

This is an interesting conversation: some of you correctly pointing out that so much AI driven development is not having a positive effect on business profitability, and others correctly pointing out positive results that give evidence for great future progress.

I have an unusual set of metrics for evaluating AI. I am old and comfortably retired but I still like to experiment with AI tools for updating many of my old (or ancient) open source projects and creating new projects. I am blown away by how good my dedicated Hermes Agent setup on a VPS and also running Google AntiGravity with Claude and Gemini are. Both systems are unbelievably good.

I can only imagine how effective companies with a solid engineering process will be as appropriate roles for human and AI developers solidify. I can also imagine companies with a poor process and poor engineering taste will waste a lot of money.

If you added up all the major AI valuations, it's apparently worth more than products Americans constantly buy and rely on for their main life. So either AI is going to be involved in every Americans life to a large degree, and paying real money for, or these valuations are insanely wrong.

$40B. Insane. Imagine what could be done with this money to improve humanity. Instead, it’s spent on a fancy text generator that promises to eliminate most of the non mundane and physical jobs, as well as create autonomous killing machines, on top of burning the entire worlds electricity. Crazy.

Interesting timing — most compliance tools in the enterprise space still treat AI infrastructure providers as black boxes. If Anthropic scales this way, SOC 2 and security questionnaires around AI vendors are going to become a much bigger deal for startups.

It is very difficult for me to see any amount of money being thrown at Anthropic as a bad idea.

The amount of new revenue that I am personally able to create for my clients, using Claude models for dev, and Claude models inside the insanely agile products delivered, is astounding.

If I was not currently experiencing this myself, and someone told me that this was possible, I would be calling them names.

Anyone else has an increasing feeling that all the AI hype is turning into a "Dot-Com Bubble x 2008 Credit Default Swaps" collab?

I consider them competitors… This reminds me of Microsoft in 1997 investing $150 million in Apple, saving it from near bankruptcy

Google investing in its own customer, Anthropic buying Google's compute. the money doesn't really leave the room.

I work at google for chrome, I can assure you nobody in our team is using gemini over claude. Haha this is hilarious

Funny how the strongest challenge to Nvidia's near-monopoly(full monopoly?) is coming from Google, and not AMD.

Still rooting for AMD to catch up too, especially if they can continue improving their software stack. They seem to be moving in the right direction.. though, they could benefit from speeding up a bit more.

Google now has it's fingers in all the pies.. is successfully fully vertically integrated and now expanding horizontally.

Good, maybe they can do something about their awful limits cutting you off mid-generation.

>> $10 billion now ... another $30 billion to follow if Anthropic hits certain performance targets...

My opinion about this is that Google see it as a way to weaken OpenAI, and few other side benefits, including the option to acquire Anthropic.

And it may very well be bad news for OpenAI.

Google puting a 40 billions in anthropic but anthropic spends it Google's own servers. The money will come back to Google. Lol

Hopefully this money means more compute infrastructure to help Anthropic counter the efficiency changes that have created this perceived downtrend in claude quality.

Weren't there reports of Anthropic's stock trading on secondary markets at $1T valuation recently? Now Google invests at a $350B valuation. I get valuations are often times just smoke and mirrors, but this seems like a pretty big disconnect. What's going on there?

My $0.02: Competing against exp(t/2) + exp(t/2) is much much easier than exp(t/2+t/2)=exp(t).

(If anthropic didn't exist, ØpenAI would suck up all the capital and talent in the room. Anthropic's existence has helped divide capital+talent that'd otherwise be gobbled up by the single fastest growing player.)

At this point if you have cash or compute credits laying around in the tens of billions, better to hedge your bets than to find out the winner that took all was not you.

If they're investing at the same valuation Anthropic had in their last round, what happened to all that previous money?

$40B. Numbers mean nothing anymore

They just announced their new chip, and they are the ones created transformers yet investing this amount in a competitor?

I don’t know what to make of it

so does that mean anthropic is going to using google tensor gpu chips ?

So $40B in google cloud credits in return for % in equity.

Didn't Amazon AWS do the same recently?

A 10B insurance policy on google’s business sounds like a bargain?

And with cashback through gcp usage!

Are they done with so called state of the art Gemini models

my take is Anthropic needs a large cash infusion since it's the one of the popular model providers.

if it runs of out of cash - then it's bad for the whole industry.

same as OpenAI. so all players - will provide cash & compute to keep them going.

"Google investing $40B in Anthropic while also competing against them is the most Silicon Valley thing I've ever seen. These companies will fund their own competition just to make sure they have a seat at the table when it wins. Also $800B valuation for a company that hasn't IPO'd yet?? We are so cooked."

Cool. Will they use their balance sheets to pour all of this cash or are they going to bring the banking system to its knees and then we bail out everyone again ?

Ive wanted to invest in Anthropic for years. The cost of not having ability to invest is hundreds of thousands for a retail investor. Maybe i should just invest in google for exposure

I think Google is using this to put pressure on OpenAI, while also getting some extra upside—like a possible path to acquire Anthropic later. And honestly, this could turn out to be bad news for OpenAI.

Google seems to own a bit of everyone.

Its like when bit torrent and utorrent were the same thing. Right now the most popular frontier model makers are Anthropic, OpenAI, Google.

In the last couple of weeks, seeing all the announcements of new models by OAI, Anthropic and Chinese companies I was thinking if Google has something up their sleeve, but this news suggests otherwise.

i intend to invest $40B in my wife's pottery business; she will invest the same amount in my uber-for-dogs AI SaaS startup. our GDP is gonna be wild.

When they said we’d soon have a circular economy I didn’t know it’d be made up of investments in AI companies that will get fed right back into inference.

This feels weird to me. Why wouldn't Google want to go all in on Gemini? Unless they feel anthropic is pretty far ahead with claude?

> Google is committing $10 billion now in cash at a $350 billion valuation and will invest a further $30 billion if Anthropic meets performance targets, the report said.

How much of this goes back to Google as cloud spend?

Is anthropic really that good when you got deepseel V4 that has a fraction of the cost and works just as good ?

"The Alphabet subsidiary is committing to invest $10 billion now, at a $350 billion valuation for Anthropic, with another $30 billion to follow if Anthropic hits certain performance targets, according to Anthropic."

this is insane. on the secondary market the valuation is 2-3x that. what gives?

The bubble is so big.

I wonder what happens to the “Gemini enterprise”. Will it do a Google plus or Google wave ?

IIRC Google already outright owns 15% of Anthropic.

It's a little weird. I work for Google, but I spend way more time helping get Anthropic serving and running than anything to do with Gemini.

Anthropic, meanwhile, is spending hundreds of millions buying customer commitments from PE firms to inflate that DAU number. They now have a larger war chest to spend on artificial user acquisition to further inflate that value for future funding rounds.

At this point I'll believe it when the money actually moves.

There's been far to many "plans" and "commitments" and an awful lot of nothing actually happening.

My AI use is significantly down. I'm sick of following Chat GPT "advise" only to learn how egregiously incorrect it is. Don't ask for DMV advice on registering an out of state car!

I wonder what will this mean for Gemini? Will it survive?

There is a lot of money in the Network of Evil.

I am still upset at these companies for driving up the RAM prices. "Free market" has evident problems - companies are way too dominating here. Average Joe suffers from this price mafia, assuming he or she needs to purchase RAM now.

From a comment below:

> My main job isn't writing code but I try to keep Claude Code and OpenCode busy and churning away on something as close to 100% of the time as I can without getting in the way of my other priorities

I’ve seen many people say this the past few weeks i.e that their daily job now is no longer coding and has flipped to being a full Claude Feeder making sure its always churning.

As someone who uses Claude Code daily, I still find myself reading code and thinking more vs just shoveling coal as fast as I can into the Claude steam train. Am I doing things wrong?

Cash injection disguised as an "investment"

I find it crazy that Google considers Anthropic to be worth almost 10% of Google itself (350B valuation mentioned in the article). Anthropic gets traction but has no moat, no infrastructure and relatively small team working for it. I feel for 40B you can get a lot of very smart people and a lot of very good hardware to outcompete it.

It’s pretty wild how badly Altman siding with Hegseth has backfired. (And how competently Dario has played his hand.)

I don’t think that’s the ultimate cause of the turnaround in fortunes. But it strikes me, at least from the investor and potentially urban-consumer perspectives, as a pivotal moment in both companies’ fortunes.

How many gigantic companies can join this before it crashes?

great move by google

10B at their valuation from last November is an absolutely killer deal. If Anthropic had sufficient compute supply they could raise at 2x easily if not 3x.

What a wonderful world our tech overlords are building for us leftover humans

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Regardless of if this is “vendor financing” or “circular financing” the history books are riddled with this sort of stuff ending very badly.

It’s concerning that the only thing that seems to be keeping the AI bubble inflated at this point is money from the folks selling things to AI companies. That’s very much not a good sign no matter how you spin it.

I’m a fan of AI and there’s clearly value to it… however that value seems completely out of whack with the money pumping into the ecosystem and at some point such irrational behaviors break.

They need it to fend off Crabby Rathbun from watching YouTube videos and commenting. The paperclip race is on, and we must win it!