Anthropic commits to spending US$200 billion on Google’s cloud and chips: report

[BENGALURU] Anthropic has committed to spend US$200 billion with Google Cloud over five years as part of a recent agreement, The Information reported on Tuesday (May 5), citing a source with knowledge of the matter.

The commitment suggests the artificial intelligence startup accounts for more than 40 per cent of the revenue backlog Google disclosed to investors last week, according to the report. The backlog reflects contractual commitments from cloud customers.

Google parent Alphabet shares were up about 2 per cent in extended trading on Tuesday following the report.

Anthropic signed a deal in April with Google and the tech firm’s chip partner Broadcom for multiple gigawatts of tensor processing unit capacity, which it expects to come online starting in 2027.

Alphabet is also investing up to US$40 billion in Anthropic, deepening its partnership with the AI startup, which is also its rival in the global AI race.

Contracts involving Anthropic and OpenAI now account for more than half of the US$2 trillion in backlogs at major cloud providers such as Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform, the US digital news outlet reported.

Reuters could not immediately verify the report. Anthropic declined to comment, while Google redirected queries to the AI firm.

Strong demand for its Claude family of AI models has driven Anthropic to sign a series of major agreements to acquire more computing capacity.

Last month, Anthropic struck a multi-year deal with cloud infrastructure firm CoreWeave and is also set to secure nearly one gigawatt of capacity via Amazon’s chips by year-end.

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Anthropic has said that it trains and runs Claude on a range of AI hardware, including Amazon Web Services’ Trainium, Google TPUs and Nvidia GPUs.

Meanwhile, Alphabet is on the cusp of overtaking Nvidia as the world’s most valuable company, driven by a record stock rally fuelled by its AI efforts and booming cloud business. REUTERS