Google plans to invest up to $40B in Anthropic

htrp

> 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?

spindump8930

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

namegulf

So $40B in google cloud credits in return for % in equity. Didn't Amazon AWS do the same recently?

Oras

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

xt00

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.

elffjs

https://archive.ph/u274V

JumpCrisscross

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.

gigatexal

"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?

urba_

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

throwawaytea

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.

munk-a

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.

33MHz-i486

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.

ordinaryradical

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.

dzonga

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.

bobkb

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

stephc_int13

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.

keasHg

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

VirusNewbie

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.

thisisauserid

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

dubeye

Google seems to own a bit of everyone.