Google once again ramps up funding for Anthropic

The AI race may have Google and Anthropic pitted as rivals, but that hasn't stopped the tech giant from investing up to $40 billion in the company.

That investment includes $10bn in cash now at Anthropic's previous valuation of $350bn, while the $30bn will arrive if the Claude developer hits performance milestones.

At time of writing, Anthropic has not explained what these performance milestones look like in detail. Neither Anthropic nor Google responded to a request for comment from ITPro by time of publication.

Google has previously invested in the AI developer, coughing up $2 billion back in 2023 and a further $1 billion in 2025, followed by a cloud deal worth tens of billions for up to a million of Google's TPUs.

The deal follows an agreement Anthropic struck with Broadcom and Google earlier in April to bring “multiple gigawatts of next-generation TPU capacity” online from 2027 onwards.

A likely reference to Google’s 8t and 8i TPUs, the majority of these next-generation TPUs will be built in the United States and form what Anthropic said is a diverse platform of training hardware based on AWS, Google, and Nvidia partnerships.

Anthropic ramps up industry collaboration

Anthropic has made a number of high-profile agreements in recent months as it looks to secure massive amounts of compute to train its frontier models. Last week, Amazon and Anthropic announced a deal worth up to $25 billion, following on from a previous investment of $8 billion.

The latest investment will see Anthropic get an additional 5GW of capacity from the cloud giant, and like the Google funding, splits the investment; Anthropic will get $5 billion now with the extra $20 billion tied to "certain commercial milestones."

"Our users tell us Claude is increasingly essential to how they work, and we need to build the infrastructure to keep pace with rapidly growing demand,” said Dario Amodei, CEO and co-founder of Anthropic, following the Amazon investment announcement.

These latest funding announcements follow an investment round in February that raised $30bn and valued the American AI startup at $380bn, a significant leap since its $183bn valuation in September.

At the time, the company said it would help it expand infrastructure and product development, as well as support future frontier model research.

Anthropic has also recently signed major infrastructure deals with cloud provider CoreWeave.

AI funding race

The AI arms race has led to massive investment in infrastructure. Amazon said back in February it expects to spend $200bn to expand compute capacity, with Google reportedly set to invest up to $185bn, with more than half on AI infrastructure.

Across Microsoft, Google-owner Alphabet, Amazon, and Meta, more than $650bn in AI capital spend is expected across 2026 alone.

Anthropic, in particular, says it plans to invest $50 billion in data centers for training and model use in the US this year.

That spending has raised concerns of an AI bubble, particularly with regard to whether the technology can ever pay off after such high spending, with many companies failing to see promised productivity gains or any return on investment as of yet.

Despite that, two-thirds of respondents to a recent survey said they would continue to invest in AI even if they didn't see tangible returns.

Anthropic's annualized revenue is now predicted to stand at $30 billion, versus $9 billion last year, according to Reuters, and is projected to break even in 2028 ahead of rival OpenAI.

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