Anthropic in talks with Google for multibillion-dollar cloud deal

By Rachel Metz, Ed Ludlow and Davey Alba

 

  Anthropic PBC is in discussions with Alphabet Inc.’s Google about a deal that would provide the artificial intelligence company with additional computing power valued in the high tens of billions of dollars, according to people familiar with the matter. 

The plan, which has not been finalized, involves Google providing cloud computing services to Anthropic, according to the people, who asked not to be named because the information is private. The deal will allow Anthropic to use Google’s tensor processing units, or TPUs — the company’s chips that are custom designed to accelerate machine learning workloads, one of the people said. Google is a previous investor in, and cloud provider for, Anthropic.

 

Anthropic and Google declined to comment. Talks are in their early stages and the details could change. Google shares rose as much as 2.3% after markets opened in New York on Wednesday, while Amazon.com Inc., also an Anthropic investor and cloud provider, slipped about 1.5%.

 

Founded in 2021 by former OpenAI employees, San Francisco-based Anthropic is best known for its Claude family of large language models, which compete with OpenAI’s GPT models. Like its peers, Anthropic has been raising significant sums to keep pace in a race to advance AI, which industry leaders say will require more resources for research and breakthroughs, as well as consumer demand.

 

Anthropic recently held early funding talks with Abu Dhabi-based investment firm MGX, about a month after closing a $13 billion funding round. That financing, led by Iconiq Capital, with Fidelity Management and Research Co. and Lightspeed Venture Partners as co-leads, nearly tripled Anthropic’s valuation to $183 billion, including dollars raised.

 

Google previously invested about $3 billion in Anthropic; the tech giant committed to invest $2 billion in the AI startup in 2023, and followed up with another $1 billion investment early this year. Amazon has committed to invest about $8 billion in Anthropic, which is a key AI customer of Amazon Web Services, and a major user of Amazon’s custom AI chips.