Google is reportedly in early discussions to significantly deepen its investment in Anthropic, signaling a major escalation in the global AI race and increasing pressure on its main rival, the Microsoft-backed OpenAI. Citing sources familiar with the matter, a report by Business Insider claims that the potential new funding round could value Anthropic, the maker of the Claude language models, at more than $350 billion.Tech giants are increasingly engaged in a high-stakes, multitrillion-dollar competition to dominate the next generation of AI models. Anthropic is backed by Amazon and Google while its direct competitor OpenAI is backed by Microsoft and Nvidia. Notably, Anthropic was founded in 2021 by former OpenAI employees.
While Anthropic recently secured a $138 billion valuation, OpenAI reached a massive $500 billion valuation last month. Google’s potential new investment aims to close that valuation gap and provide Anthropic with critical resources and take its market capitalisation to over $350 billion – taking it closer to the ChatGPT-maker.
Google’s strategic AI push
Google has already committed more than $3 billion to Anthropic, giving it a 14% stake. The new investment could take several forms, including a traditional investment round early next year, providing additional cloud computing services to Anthropic and a form of short-term debt that converts to equity later.Regardless of the structure, the goal is to ensure Anthropic has the immense computing power needed to challenge OpenAI, which struck multiple billion-dollar partnerships with chipmakers and cloud computing companies.The negotiations build on existing large-scale agreements. Last October, Google and Anthropic announced a deal worth tens of billions of dollars, granting Anthropic access to up to one million of Google’s custom-designed Tensor Processing Units (TPUs), chips specifically built to accelerate machine learning workloads.Anthropic maintains a dual cloud strategy, using Amazon Web Services (AWS) as its primary training partner and cloud provider, while also leveraging Google’s TPUs.
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