Google and Anthropic have struck a deal that will see the AI upstart gain access to up to a million of the web giant’s tensor processing units (TPUs) and involve “tens of billions of dollars.”
The two companies announced the deal on Thursday, with Anthropic pitching it as “expanded capacity” that the company will use to meet surging customer demand and allow it to conduct “more thorough testing, alignment research, and responsible deployment at scale.”
Google’s take on the deal is that it will enable Anthropic to “train and serve the next generations of Claude models,” and involves “additional Google Cloud services, which will empower its research and development teams with leading AI-optimized infrastructure for years to come.”
The search and ads giant claims the deal “represents the largest expansion of Anthropic’s TPU usage to date” and says the AI upstart “chose TPUs due to their price-performance and efficiency, and the company’s existing experience in training and serving its models with TPUs.”
Anthropic’s announcement points out it’s betting on companies other than Google.
“Anthropic’s unique compute strategy focuses on a diversified approach that efficiently uses three chip platforms – Google’s TPUs, Amazon’s Trainium, and Nvidia’s GPUs,” the statement explains. “This multi-platform approach ensures we can continue advancing Claude’s capabilities while maintaining strong partnerships across the industry.”
Anthropic also stated: “We remain committed to our partnership with Amazon, our primary training partner and cloud provider, and continue to work with the company on Project Rainier, a massive compute cluster with hundreds of thousands of AI chips across multiple U.S. data centers.”
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AI infrastructure announcements nearly always feature enormous numbers and breathless enthusiasm about how the tech will improve everything … but little detail about how players will pay for, and profit from, the billions spent on giant chip farms.
Anthropic’s news departs from that script a little by mentioning that it “now serves more than 300,000 business customers, and our number of large accounts – customers that each represent more than $100,000 in run-rate revenue – has grown nearly 7x in the past year.” The company didn’t say how many of those $100k customers it has on the books, but reportedly plans to generate up to $26 billion of annual revenue by 2026. By way of comparison, HPE booked $30 billion in revenue in its FY 2024, while Google’s parent company Alphabet generated $350 billion in revenue last year. ®
