Google holds talks with Anthropic to increase investment
The search engine platform has invested over $3 billion in the American AI startup, offering it a 14 percent stake in the company
Media reports have indicated that Google is holding talks to expand its investment in Anthropic. The arrangement could lead to a strategic investment where Google would offer additional cloud computing services to Anthropic, a convertible note, or a priced funding round in 2026.
The new round of funding could value Anthropic at over $350 billion. However, Google’s investment and whether it would invite more investors in this round is unclear.
The search engine platform has invested over $3 billion in Anthropic, offering it a 14 percent stake in the company.
In September, Anthropic raised $13 billion at a $138 billion valuation, whereas in October, in a secondary sale that allowed employees to sell shares, OpenAI reached a $500 billion valuation.
The recent discussions were held as Anthropic and its rival, OpenAI, maker of ChatGPT, were in a multitrillion-dollar race to dominate the models that power AI.
Meanwhile, Big Tech companies are taking sides, with Amazon and Google backing Anthropic, and Microsoft and Nvidia investing billions in OpenAI.
Anthropic was founded in 2021 by former employees of OpenAI and is best known for its Claude family of large language models. It uses Nvidia’s GPUs to train and power its models.
Recently, Google and Anthropic announced a massive cloud computing deal worth billions of dollars. It provides the latter access to one million of Google’s custom-designed Tensor Processing Units (TPUs), designed to accelerate machine learning workloads.
Amazon has also invested $14 billion in Anthropic, which uses Amazon Web Services (AWS) custom chips to build and deploy its AI models. In October, Anthropic stated, “We are committed to the partnership with Amazon, our primary training partner and cloud provider.”
Amazon’s Project Rainer, one of the world’s largest AI compute clusters with half a million Trainium2 chips, recently came online to power Claude.