Skip to content
Compute Crunch

Google will invest as much as $40 billion in Anthropic

This follows a similar, but smaller, investment by Amazon just days ago.

Samuel Axon – | 83
Two racks of TPU 8i chips. Each rack has eight boards with four TPUs. Credit: Google
Two racks of TPU 8i chips. Each rack has eight boards with four TPUs. Credit: Google
Story text

Google will invest at least $10 billion in Anthropic, and that amount could rise to $40 billion if Anthropic meets certain performance targets, Bloomberg reports.

The investment follows Amazon’s $5 billion initial investment in Anthropic a few days ago; the Amazon deal also leaves the door open to further investment based on performance. Both investments value Anthropic at $350 billion.

Anthropic has seen rapid growth in the use of its Claude models and related products, such as Claude Code, which promises to significantly increase the speed and efficiency with which companies or individuals can develop software. (The reality varies from big improvements to setbacks, depending on the nature of the project and company, how Claude Code is used, and many other factors.)

Several factors contributed to Anthropic’s success in recent months, including controversies around OpenAI and its ChatGPT product and models, more robust agentic workflows, and new products like Claude Cowork, which does some of the same things for general knowledge work tasks as Claude Code does for software development.

The result has been a dramatic increase in demand for Anthropic’s services, leading to outages and other problems. Anthropic has been testing solutions to reduce demand, like imposing limits during peak hours, or exploring removing some of the most compute-intensive tools from cheaper service plans.

These investments are meant to help close the gap between demand and supply of compute for Claude Code and its ilk. Amazon and Google are providing chips suitable for AI training and inference and cloud compute capacity to help Anthropic scale up quickly.

This has become a common scheme for investment in AI companies like Anthropic; established companies like Microsoft have products and services that can help new AI companies like Anthropic scale, so the former invests in the latter so the latter can, in turn, pay for the former’s products and services.

This is not the first time Anthropic has received investment from Google, even though Google is ostensibly competing with Anthropic over AI models.

Photo of Samuel Axon
Samuel Axon Senior Editor
Samuel Axon is the editorial lead for tech and gaming coverage at Ars Technica. He covers AI, software development, gaming, entertainment, and mixed reality. He has been writing about gaming and technology for nearly two decades at Engadget, PC World, Mashable, Vice, Polygon, Wired, and others. He previously ran a marketing and PR agency in the gaming industry, led editorial for the TV network CBS, and worked on social media marketing strategy for Samsung Mobile at the creative agency SPCSHP. He also is an independent software and game developer for iOS, Windows, and other platforms, and he is a graduate of DePaul University, where he studied interactive media and software development.
83 Comments
Prev story
Next story