Google investing up to $40 billion in Anthropic

Alphabet’s Google will invest up to $40 billion in Anthropic, the AI startup behind the Claude family of models, at a $350 billion valuation, according to Bloomberg. Under the terms of the deal, the first $10 billion arrives as an upfront cash commitment, while the remaining $30 billion is tied to whether Anthropic clears certain performance benchmarks.

Separately, Google Cloud has agreed to deliver five gigawatts of computing power to Anthropic across a five-year window, with the door open to several additional gigawatts down the line, according to Bloomberg. That computing arrangement builds on a three-way agreement between Anthropic, Google, and Broadcom that was announced earlier this month.

Earlier this week, Anthropic announced a $5 billion infusion from Amazon, according to Reuters, with an option for Amazon to put in as much as $20 billion more over time. Both deals value Anthropic at $350 billion — the same figure attached to a funding round the company closed in February.

The fundraising surge reflects booming appetite for Claude Code, Anthropic’s AI agent built to accelerate software writing, which Bloomberg says has driven the company to seek capital at a rapid clip. Anthropic’s Cowork agent, pitched at workers outside the engineering world, is also seeing rapid adoption, the company said. According to Bloomberg, current and former Google employees say the company’s top executives have grown anxious about being outpaced in AI coding, a fast-growing segment where Anthropic has established a commanding lead.

Before launching Anthropic in 2021 with a cohort of colleagues who had departed OpenAI, Dario Amodei spent time at Google working in AI research. The two companies have maintained a close business relationship since then. Prior to the new deal, Google had put roughly $3 billion into Anthropic and had pledged to hand over as many as one million of its tensor processing unit chips to the startup, Bloomberg reported.

Google stock was up more than 1% Friday following the news.