The latest sign of the AI industry’s relentless hunt for the unchanging power of computing comes from the extended agreement between anthropic and Google – as several people, as many people have been hit in recent months, emphasize the rise of circular arrangements throughout Silicon Valley. Under the new agreement, Google will provide anthropic with one gigawatt of computing capacity by 2026, the companies announced yesterday (Oct. 23).
Anthropic noted that the deal is worth “tens of billions of dollars” but did not provide an exact price. The partnership also deepens the start-up relationship with Google, which has already invested about $3 billion in anthropic and is expected to provide the company with millions of AI Chips, called Tensor Processing Units (TPUS).
Such collaboration is increasingly important as leading AI Startup Scale in the breakneck pocket. Anthropic, which now serves more than 300,000 business customers, said the number of customers generating more than $100,000 in annual revenue has grown nearly sevenfold over the past year. “Anthropic and Google have a long-standing partnership, and this latest innovation will help us continue to scale the compute we need to define the financial frontier of AI,” said Krishna Rao, Anthropic’s chief financial officer, in a statement.
Founded in 2021 by CEO Dario Amodei and a handful of freelancers, anthropic positioned itself as an alternative focused on early AI players. Best known for its Chatbot Claude, the company recently hit a valuation of $183 billion and is reportedly on track to generate $9 billion in annual revenue.
Despite its close relationship with Google, anthropic emphasized that it remains committed to “the main training partner,” Amazon, which has invested $ 8 billion to provide computers with its rainier chip and AI Cluster Project. The company also continues to rely on Nvidia’s GPU as part of what it calls a “multi-platform approach.” Anthropic said it will continue to invest in additional computing power as needed.
Anthropic’s beneficial relationship with Google and Amazon reflects a broader trend: A broader industry trend: a growing web of AI convergence between model developers and integrated providers, investing in and buying each other’s technology. Opena has been at the forefront of this change, announcing a flurry of major deals in recent months, including an agreement with AMD to access six gigawatts of computing power, and a $300 billion, five-year partnership with Oracle.
The growing proliferation of such circular arrangements has raised some eyebrows in Silicon Valley, recalling the supposed confluence of the dot-com bubble and its eventual crash. But unlike in the past, today’s AI spending is constrained by huge capital and capitalization opportunities, said Stephanie Aliaga, Global Market Strategist for JPMorgan Chase, in a blog post earlier this month.
However, Aliaga cautioned that concern is not worth it. “The scale of spending is huge, the speed of speed is unprecedented, and certain assumptions around ROI, such as the active lives of assets, remain open questions,” he said. “History reminds us that passion can run ahead of reality,” he wrote.