Artificial intelligence (AI) startup Anthropic has pledged to spend up to 200 billion USD on Google Cloud and chips over the next five years, according to a report by tech news outlet The Information on Tuseday.
The report reveals that Anthropic made this substantial commitment as part of a recent contract with Google.
This deal is estimated to represent more than 40% of Google’s cloud backlog, which was recently disclosed to investors.
The backlog refers to future revenue from signed contracts that have not yet been recognized as sales.
The report indicates that contracts involving Anthropic and OpenAI account for over half of the 2 trillion USD total backlog among major cloud providers, including Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud.
Following this news, Alphabet’s stock climbed about 2% in after-hours trading.
Previously, Anthropic secured a deal with Google and semiconductor partner Broadcom for several gigawatts of tensor processing unit (TPU) capacity, set to come online in 2027.
Alphabet, Google’s parent company, has also committed to investing up to 40 billion USD in Anthropic, deepening their partnership. The two companies compete in the global AI market, creating a dynamic of simultaneous collaboration and rivalry.
To meet the surging demand for its AI model Claude, Anthropic is aggressively expanding its computing resources. The company recently inked a long-term contract with cloud provider CoreWeave and plans to secure about 1 GW of additional computing power through Amazon’s AI chips by year-end.
Anthropic currently leverages a diverse array of hardware, including Amazon Web Services’ Trainium chips, Google TPUs, and NVIDIA graphic processing units (GPUs), to train and run its AI models.
Meanwhile, industry watchers speculate that Alphabet could overtake NVIDIA as the world’s most valuable company by market cap, driven by growth in its AI and cloud businesses.
As of Tuesday’s market close, NVIDIA’s market cap stood at approximately 4.8 trillion USD, with Alphabet close behind at around 4.6 trillion USD. While NVIDIA remains in the lead, the gap has narrowed to about 200 billion USD.