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Google plans to invest up to $40B in Anthropic
- xt00 5mo agoAt this point if you have cash or compute credits laying around in the tens of billions, better to hedge your bets than to find out the winner that took all was not you.
- addaon 5mo agoUnless none of the current crop of AI companies is “the winner,” either because a newcomer appears or the craze fizzles… in which case have $40B in the bank seems superior.
- urba_ 5mo agoI consider them competitors… This reminds me of Microsoft in 1997 investing $150 million in Apple, saving it from near bankruptcy
- SecretDreams 5mo agoIt just keeps the lights on for the whole industry. The tech is great but valuations are out of control. It's cheaper to keep valuations high through these circular financing deals, rather than to allow for any deflation.
- lanthissa 5mo agogoogles multiple businesses and gemini isn't the largest one. anthropic is the anchor external customer of tpu's and nvidia is worth more than all of google. If tpu's actually breakout as a viable alternative over the next few years for multiple clients the business could easily be worth as much as search, maybe more.
- billisonline 5mo ago> If tpu's actually breakout as a viable alternative over the next few years Why haven't they broken out yet, I wonder, if they're more efficient for inference and LLM costs are now weighted towards inference over training?
- chris_st 5mo agoPossibly because they just haven't been able to manufacture enough of them yet to be a viable business to others? They're fighting everyone else for foundry space and time.
- zaphar 5mo agoYou essentially have to run in google to use them and that probably limits their ability to breakout. Anthropic might be doing this deal as a way to shore up their supply chain and cost of both inference and training by leveraging Google's hardware and chip manufacturing expertise.
- lanthissa 5mo agothere are literally not enough tpu's on earth for them to break out, every tpu thats been made is in use, the spike in demand is recent and google has heavy competition for foundry space.
- AnggaSP 5mo agoTPUs are not that portable and easy for both inferencing and training. It has since improved a lot with their effort on the torch backend (XLA/TorchTPU) and JAX though. But as far as i know it currently supports just that + tensorflow (which nobody uses it anymore, least here). And last we tried, so much of our kernels needs rework that it’s not worth the effort. This may change since ironwood but we haven’t tried that generation.
- nikcub 5mo agoGoogle cloud also need to be able to offer Anthropic models on Vertex otherwise they just won't be competitive. Microsoft is in the same boat with Azure.
- shimman 5mo agoGoogle Cloud also needs to show constant quarterly growth so what better way than simply buying it and fudging the numbers?
- casey2 5mo agoAnthropics erratic behavior is going to get Google regulated. This is "don't rock the boat" money. Google existentially needs AI for advertising.
- warkdarrior 5mo ago> Google existentially needs AI for advertising. What's the explanation behind this? I am sure they use AI in their ad network (matching web sites with ad offerings, maybe generating ads automatically), but is there more to it?
- crumby 5mo agoI know AI companies are selling ad training into the models so the models know about your product. I'm not sure if that is what they were referring to, but it could be related.
- kshacker 5mo agoThat was precisely my thought on seeing the news. I did not know about Google's existing entanglements with anthropic, but it seemed like a clear message - Do not panic on the money, do the work.
- nubg 5mo ago"Do not panic on the money, do the work." - sorry what do you mean by that?
- kshacker 5mo agoIf you look at their recent actions, they all seem financial as if they have become the monopoly already and can do anything. Maybe it is driven by fear of going bankrupt Example. Them doing a AB test where they remove Claude CLI from the 20$ pro plan ... they rolled it back now. Other rate limits where they publicly double your quota at NON peak times but lower it during peak quietly. These are tacky and signs of panic. One such issue is experimentation. But when you see back to back issues, it looks odd.
- twoodfin 5mo agoGoogle is right (I think) to invest in winning compute share from Nvidia over winning token share from other frontier model builders.
- infecto 5mo agoThey already had a non trivial stake in Anthropic though?
- altern8 5mo agoIf I remember correctly, Microsoft allegedly did that for the very selfish reason of looking better in terms of being a monopoly.
- stavros 5mo agoRather than for the altruistic reason of saving a struggling fellow company?
- politelemon 5mo agoOf course this is well known. Everything Microsoft does is for selfish capitalist reasons and everything Apple does is for altruistic philanthropic reasons.
- kqp 5mo agoThey’re publicly traded for-profit companies, selfishness is literally the definition of both of them and it’s the farthest thing from a secret.
- raincole 5mo agoThey are, but Google Vertex has been one of the official ways to use Claude since forever.
- hu3 5mo ago> Microsoft in 1997 investing $150 million in Apple, saving it from near bankruptcy. If only Apple could pass the favor forward. But no, they can't be bothered to invest even a single million in Asashi Linux to benefit their own hardware.
- pmdr 5mo agoWell, the way Apple sees it, their hardware ships with a perfectly good OS. And they know their hardware has so far been so good that even if they ruin said OS, they'd still make money. What we (and Apple, as competition) need is a serious macbook-killer with full Linux support.
- cmrdporcupine 5mo agoIt was more complicated than that. Microsoft was only kind of a competitor to Apple. Apple was also a platform for them. They shipped software that was popular on the Mac (mainly Word). Especially in those days Microsoft was both a platform for software to run on, and a maker of software, and being flexible to emphasize one or the other aspect depending on the way the market is... has been good for them.
- VirusNewbie 5mo agoIt's a little weird. I work for Google, but I spend way more time helping get Anthropic serving and running than anything to do with Gemini.
- brcmthrowaway 5mo agoThis is a good strategy. Internal competition between Gemini and GCP.
- thatguysaguy 5mo agoThat's b/c the people working on Gemini serving are in GDM.
- thisisauserid 5mo ago>> $10 billion now ... another $30 billion to follow if Anthropic hits certain performance targets...
- dubeye 5mo agoGoogle seems to own a bit of everyone.
- airstrike 5mo agoyou might even say they own the whole alphabet at this point
- aucisson_masque 5mo agoIs anthropic really that good when you got deepseel V4 that has a fraction of the cost and works just as good ?
- dzhiurgis 5mo agoI think their cli still leading for some reason. Not sure if it’s going to be good enough to replace IDEs with neatly integrated superior models.
- Aldipower 5mo agoAt least from an European perspective it is impossible to use DeepSeek v4 right now, as there are no privacy safe offerings.
- atleastoptimal 5mo agoIve wanted to invest in Anthropic for years. The cost of not having ability to invest is hundreds of thousands for a retail investor. Maybe i should just invest in google for exposure
- htrp 5mo ago> Google is committing $10 billion now in cash at a $350 billion valuation and will invest a further $30 billion if Anthropic meets performance targets, the report said. How much of this goes back to Google as cloud spend?
- dmk 5mo agoGoogle investing $40bn in a company that competes directly with Gemini is one of those moves that only makes sense if you think of it as buying compute customers, not backing a competitor. Anthropic pays Google for TPUs and Cloud services, a big chunk of this investment surely has to flow right back to Google.
- spindump8930 5mo agoHopefully this money means more compute infrastructure to help Anthropic counter the efficiency changes that have created this perceived downtrend in claude quality.
- palmotea 5mo agoThe puzzling thing is why Google would try to help with that. Aren't they competitors? Wouldn't they want their competitor to have problems? It's more understanding for Amazon or Microsoft to make such an investment, because they're not as competitive in the model space.
- morelikeborelax 5mo agoWhat if Google can't compete? They don't want to be left behind and all this money being throw around is just nonsense anyway.
- infecto 5mo agoGoogle was already an investor in Anthropic but I don’t think they are truly competitors in this space.
- michelb 5mo agoDeepmind is heavily using Claude. This could help secure computing power.
- tomrod 5mo agoI'm not up to date, I think. How so?
- michelb 5mo agoThere's been a spat between some people on X, about how few engineers inside Google want to work with Gemini, given that it apparently is not great with code, and they would rather use Claude. This same sentiment is there within Deepmind, except they have more power it seems. Perhaps Google is hedging their bet? Best non-X link I could find: https://benzatine.com/news-room/internal-strife-at-google-the-claude-access-divide https://benzatine.com/news-room/internal-strife-at-google-th...
- namegulf 5mo agoSo $40B in google cloud credits in return for % in equity. Didn't Amazon AWS do the same recently?
- ChrisArchitect 5mo agoAnthropic takes $5B from Amazon and pledges $100B in cloud spending in return https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47848276 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47848276
- laweijfmvo 5mo ago[dead]
- Oras 5mo agoThey just announced their new chip, and they are the ones created transformers yet investing this amount in a competitor? I don’t know what to make of it
- pupppet 5mo agoI wonder if Google regrets publishing that article on transformers.
- jeffbee 5mo agoUrs used to talk (internally) about not publishing "industry-enabling papers" which is why most Google infrastructure papers were describing something that had already been turned off, or was already in the process of being replaced by the next system (GFS, Vitess, etc). The things that did get published were either considered not key advantages, that other companies simply cannot do, things that other companies wouldn't bother doing, or experiments that never worked at all. There were exceptions of course. But it led to a public perception of the Google stack involving mostly technologies that were long dead or were never adopted. "Attention Is All You Need" was a very very different thing and I also wonder if they are glad they published it. But I imagine if they hadn't, the motivation for researchers to leave Google would have been even larger.
- sumedh 5mo agoSo Google allowed publishing the Attention paper because they didn't understand its value.
- CamperBob2 5mo agoThey patented it. When the dumb money stops sloshing around, we'll start to see the fallout from that.
- cameronbrown 5mo ago> I also wonder if they are glad they published it https://youtu.be/ue9MWfvMylE https://youtu.be/ue9MWfvMylE Jeff Dean is asked this question by Geoffrey Hinton at 37:35 - might worth watching. Overall an interesting video.
- elffjs 5mo agohttps://archive.ph/u274V https://archive.ph/u274V
- JumpCrisscross 5mo agoIt’s pretty wild how badly Altman siding with Hegseth has backfired. (And how competently Dario has played his hand.) I don’t think that’s the ultimate cause of the turnaround in fortunes. But it strikes me, at least from the investor and potentially urban-consumer perspectives, as a pivotal moment in both companies’ fortunes.
- danielbln 5mo agoAlphabet makes $30 billion profit per quarter.
- sevenzero 5mo agoWhich means they can allow themselves to blast money left and right? Its still a big investment.
- JumpCrisscross 5mo ago> Alphabet makes $30 billion profit per quarter Sure. Neither OpenAI or Anthropic do. Amazon and Google have followed institutional investors bidding up Anthropic over OpenAI in private markets, all of which—I suspect—followed user-pattern shifts following the fiasco. (Well, fiascos. Altman is a host unto himself.)
- 5mo ago
- gigatexal 5mo ago"The Alphabet subsidiary is committing to invest $10 billion now, at a $350 billion valuation for Anthropic, with another $30 billion to follow if Anthropic hits certain performance targets, according to Anthropic." this is insane. on the secondary market the valuation is 2-3x that. what gives?
- nly 5mo agoTop of the book? Nobody on the secondary market is investing $30bn
- JumpCrisscross 5mo ago> Nobody on the secondary market is investing $30bn Correct. But I think $5 to 10bn are sitting ready for $700 to 800, which strongly implies Google is getting a solid deal on this.
- panarky 5mo ago[dead]
- Handy-Man 5mo agoThat's the last round they raised at. They had other offers from VCs at ~850B they rejected. Seems like may have been in works since that last round was being raised and just finished paperwork?
- lanthissa 5mo agoGoogles giving them something thats a lot more scares to them then dollars, large volumes of chips quickly. If you gave anthropic 10b cash they couldn't get chips in the 0-6mo timeframe at scale. Anthropic is suffering reputational damage due to choices they have to make around capacity constraints. Google, AWS, and Azure are the only people who can help them so they hold the cards, thus the good terms.
- panarky 5mo agoAnthropic raised $30 billion at a $350 billion valuation (pre-money) in February. Google's deal from prior rounds likely lets them buy in at the same valuation other investors get every round, so they're just getting the February valuation. Amazon did almost the same thing last week, at the same valuation.
- throwawaytea 5mo agoIf you added up all the major AI valuations, it's apparently worth more than products Americans constantly buy and rely on for their main life. So either AI is going to be involved in every Americans life to a large degree, and paying real money for, or these valuations are insanely wrong.
- JumpCrisscross 5mo ago> it's apparently worth more than products Americans constantly buy and rely on for their main life What are you counting in this category?
- throwawaytea 5mo agoThere are countless examples, but let's say Ford. Worth $150 billion, $50 billion not counting debt. My neighbors just gave Ford $60k. It'll be a while until my neighbor gives Anthropic $60k.
- JumpCrisscross 5mo agoI guess I’m not surprised that if one “added up all the major AI valuations,” it’s more than any single consumer purchase or even most single companies.
- ai-x 5mo agoDid you add Google, Meta, Apple, Amazon in that because more people consume from these firms than Ford
- ipaddr 5mo agoHis neighbour isn't spending $60,000 on all of those together
- _puk 5mo agoCount the Fords on the street. Now count the Amazon deliveries in a year on said same street. And next year, and the year after, and.. however long one keeps a Ford these days.. It's quite a scary thought exercise.
- munk-a 5mo agoAnthropic, meanwhile, is spending hundreds of millions buying customer commitments from PE firms to inflate that DAU number. They now have a larger war chest to spend on artificial user acquisition to further inflate that value for future funding rounds.
- 33MHz-i486 5mo agoI think the subtext of the last few weeks is the Anthropic was becoming severely capacity constrained (or approaching that). They seem to have had to sign two somewhat adverse contracts with Amazon and Google in short succession. suddenly model quality is back up again.
- Onavo 5mo agoWell to a certain extent it also blunts competition, Gemini is less of a threat if their main investor is also backing Anthropic. The issue is when the pyramid scheme collapses...
- ValentineC 5mo agoBoth Amazon and Google provide the Claude models via their Kiro and Antigravity IDEs respectively. It could also be investing in their attempt to own the IDE space.
- inquirerGeneral 5mo ago[dead]
- tiffanyh 5mo agoThat’s what’s needed when you go from $9B in ARR … to $30B in ARR literally just one quarter later. That kind of insane growth & demand is unprecedented at that scale. https://www.anthropic.com/news/google-broadcom-partnership-compute https://www.anthropic.com/news/google-broadcom-partnership-c...
- iLoveOncall 5mo agoRun-rate revenue is not ARR. For all we know they could have a revenue of $100 and claim a run-rate revenue of $30B. Given the fact that both Altman and Amodei are pathological liars, there's absolutely no reason to believe that Anthropic has $30B ARR.
- 5mo ago
- ordinaryradical 5mo agoIt feels like the market is full Wiley Coyote on frontier model makers, and I like Anthropic's B2B business model. But all progress points to a commodification of foundation models--Google first named it as "we have no moat, neither does anyone else." So there must be some secondary play driving this, right? Hardware sales? Hedging for search ad revenue? Still feels mispriced. I think asset inflation leaves too much money desperate for the Next Big Thing.
- zaphar 5mo agoGoogle does have a sort of temporary moat. They have a much better hardware supply line story than anyone else and the revenue to maintain that edge indefinitely.
- JumpCrisscross 5mo agoIf AI is commoditising, who is Bahrain and who are the Saudis?
- catlover76 5mo ago[dead]
- Urahandystar 5mo agoThe app layer is Bahrain.
- mikelitoris 5mo agoWhat does that mean?
- mh- 5mo agoI believe they were drawing a parallel to oil commoditization, but that's as far as I got.
- JumpCrisscross 5mo ago
- dzonga 5mo agomy take is Anthropic needs a large cash infusion since it's the one of the popular model providers. if it runs of out of cash - then it's bad for the whole industry. same as OpenAI. so all players - will provide cash & compute to keep them going.
- sdevonoes 5mo ago> if it runs of out of cash - then it's bad for the whole industry. Why? I don’t think we would suffer if anthropic disappeared tomorrow
- ares623 5mo agoGoogle, Microsoft, Oracle, Meta, Nvidia. All their stock gains in the last 2 or so years were because of the AI hype. And who knows how much money the borrowed and promises they made on the assumption that their stock will continue to rise in the same pace for years to come. When one domino falls, they will follow. So they have every incentive to keep the music going for one of their "friends".
- goolz 5mo agoIf Anthropic disappeared tomorrow due to running out of cash it would cause a great panic, no?
- slashdave 5mo agoThey need compute
- bobkb 5mo agoI wonder what happens to the “Gemini enterprise”. Will it do a Google plus or Google wave ?
- wasting_time 5mo agoGemini seems more tailored towards information retrieval and product integration (including Android and even iOS via Apple's deal). Google may reckon they can't (yet) reconcile their vision of Gemini with the raw coding performance of Claude and Codex.
- bobkb 5mo agoThey have recently added Veo and family and pretty much everything under Vertex branding to Gemini enterprise
- stephc_int13 5mo agoMy opinion about this is that Google see it as a way to weaken OpenAI, and few other side benefits, including the option to acquire Anthropic. And it may very well be bad news for OpenAI.
- siva7 5mo agoThat boat has sailed off. Not even Google has the cash to buy a company valued at almost a trillion dollars.
- stephc_int13 5mo agoMaybe, I think there is a lot of uncertainty about valuations of AI labs in the near to medium future. OpenAI crashing would be good news and bad news for Anthropic investors.
- SJC_Hacker 5mo agoValued at a trillion by basically, no one who would actually invest anywhere close to that
- aurareturn 5mo agoBring them to public market and I’d bet my house it will shoot up to $2t on first day.
- Ifkaluva 5mo agoI do in fact plan to bet my house on that day.
- charcircuit 5mo agoYou don't have to buy companies with cash.
- com2kid 5mo agoIt'd be funny if Google offered 750m in stock + cash just to see what happened... :D The drama on HN alone would last for days. Twitter would implode in on itself.
- keasHg 5mo agoThey need it to fend off Crabby Rathbun from watching YouTube videos and commenting. The paperclip race is on, and we must win it!
- forrestthewoods 5mo ago10B at their valuation from last November is an absolutely killer deal. If Anthropic had sufficient compute supply they could raise at 2x easily if not 3x.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- whatever1 5mo agoCool. Will they use their balance sheets to pour all of this cash or are they going to bring the banking system to its knees and then we bail out everyone again ?
- shimman 5mo agoI don't see why not. The US is bailing out foreign countries, might as well bail out unsustainable businesses too.
- dwayne_dibley 5mo ago$40B. Numbers mean nothing anymore
- pcurve 5mo agoYup. You can actually buy several European airlines with that kind of money. For example, you can buy KLM Air france for less than $3B. It is a profitable business that does $30B in sales and $1B in profit. (and has been profitable since for the past 4-5 years)
- hayd 5mo ago"$30B in sales and $1B in profit." This margin seems terrible.
- oscarcp 5mo ago4% seems reasonable, it's pretty much standard across the board in Europe (median sits around 6% if I recall correctly), not many companies can pull 10% profit. For example in Spain, major conglomerates like INDITEX have a 11%, Iberdrola has a 10%. We also don't use the same metrics and parameters as the US for profit, so the values are skewed. That said, certain sectors like software (as in custom enterprise grade software dev) pull revenues that are much much higher sitting around 35%, but it's not that common.
- Jabbles 5mo agoIt has $40B in liabilities. [PDF] https://www.airfranceklm.com/sites/default/files/2026-02/2025.12-air-france-klm-consolidated-financial-statements-and-notes.pdf https://www.airfranceklm.com/sites/default/files/2026-02/202...
- nikcub 5mo agoAirlines are down there amongst cinema chains and video game retail stores in terms of being terrible businesses
- 5mo ago
- consumer451 5mo agoIt is very difficult for me to see any amount of money being thrown at Anthropic as a bad idea. The amount of new revenue that I am personally able to create for my clients, using Claude models for dev, and Claude models inside the insanely agile products delivered, is astounding. If I was not currently experiencing this myself, and someone told me that this was possible, I would be calling them names.
- zakisaad 5mo agoYou could say the same about Codex (and other tooling). Opus as a model is market leading (trading blows with the greatest that OpenAI is peddling), but there will be a reckoning when open weight models are good enough - and I'd argue we are almost there with some of the latest releases. If you hook up the latest OpenAI models to something like OpenCode, its a taste of what an open harness with a powerful model (outside of a providers ecosystem) will be able to offer developers in the future.
- consumer451 5mo agoI know there are multiple paths at this, thank the computing gods. If we get to an end-state of monopoly/duopoly at this game, then we are truly screwed. I was just stating my current use and revenue path. Anthropic has insane velocity, in April of 2026.
- neya 5mo ago> when open weight models are good enough I think Deepseek is already there.
- kowbell 5mo ago> there will be a reckoning when open weight models are good enough Will you have the hardware to run them? Perhaps. Will enough of Anthropic's/OpenAI's large enterprise customers have the hardware to run them and the money/desire to have their own internal teams set up and maintain them?
- slopinthebag 5mo agoWhy do AI boosters like yourself all have the same writing style? Was the comment AI generated? It's like insane hype marketing speak. "insanely agile products delivered" like huh?
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- bluecalm 5mo agoI find it crazy that Google considers Anthropic to be worth almost 10% of Google itself (350B valuation mentioned in the article). Anthropic gets traction but has no moat, no infrastructure and relatively small team working for it. I feel for 40B you can get a lot of very smart people and a lot of very good hardware to outcompete it.
- siva7 5mo ago25% ;)
- GoToRO 5mo agothe moat is the tool itself. You understand this after you start using it.
- sumedh 5mo ago> You understand this after you start using it. Its just amazing people that people talk about Anthropic and have never used it.
- conradkay 5mo ago> I feel for 40B you can get a lot of very smart people and a lot of very good hardware to outcompete it Nah, see Meta
- chpatrick 5mo agoI think the very smart people already work at Google and the 40B buys some of the rest.
- cromka 5mo agoAnyone else has an increasing feeling that all the AI hype is turning into a "Dot-Com Bubble x 2008 Credit Default Swaps" collab?
- littlestymaar 5mo agox oil shock (due to Ormuz).
- 0xbadcafebee 5mo agoIt's an actual bubble specific to AI. This investment is just another example of the bubble. Pre-2008, all the investment would be coming from banks. Post-2008, all the investment came from VCs... but VCs got tapped out, so AI companies went to bigger private capital. They tapped out all the private capital. So now they're making the rounds, making deals with any corporations left with tens/hundreds of billions in cash, because they're the only possible investors left. When all of them are tapped out, and without a release of pressure from the hardware market, the only investor left will be the government. After that it's kaplooie. You'll notice that all the really big deals have fallen through, because they're based on promises and meeting objectives that can't be met. So it's likely that there will be really big writeoffs but not a huge implosion like 2001/2008. The real losers will be the retail investors who put all their money in a handful of stocks at ridiculous valuations.
- uncivilized 5mo agoWhich big deals have fallen through?
- mhitza 5mo ago"Nvidia’s $100 billion OpenAI deal has seemingly vanished" https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2026/02/five-months-later-nvidias-100-billion-openai-investment-plan-has-fizzled-out/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2026/02/five-... "Disney cancels $1B deal with OpenAI after video platform Sora is shut down: 'The future is human'" https://finance.yahoo.com/sectors/technology/articles/disney-cancels-1b-deal-openai-043000427.html https://finance.yahoo.com/sectors/technology/articles/disney... And if I recall correctly the AI datacenter deal isn'tdoing Oracle stock any favours.
- 6thbit 5mo agoA 10B insurance policy on google’s business sounds like a bargain? And with cashback through gcp usage!
- zmmmmm 5mo agoIt feels like Anthropic is everybody's insurance policy against someone else winning the AI race. So you have Amazon, Google, Microsoft basically every major tech company pushing their own tech hard but simultaneously ensuring they have a survival level stake in Anthropic if they can't build or acquire their way to stay at frontier level performance themselves.
- dmix 5mo agoMaybe it was never really about maximizing the model technology as the ultimate end goal and far more about the business side and infrastructure. The software will only improve for so long before it hits a wall. The best models were just a proxy for early mainstream market adoption, keeping your head above the water … plus some useful marketing hype about longshots for developing something bigger than LLMs (“AGI”). People who work in tech are biased to obsess about the technical side and short term uptime/performance outrage. Despite that being mostly just standard immature market issues.
- stingraycharles 5mo agoI find it interesting that Anthropic is in this position and not OpenAI. Where did OpenAI go wrong? Lack of focus and overambitious in some of their spending commitments?
- argee 5mo agoIsn’t the only thing OpenAI did was: throwing a half baked model out for the public to go ham on? I was at Google when they did this and we already had working LLMs internally, they just weren’t good enough to release without PR backlash. I don’t see why such a pithy “advantage” should have led to anything other than a moment in the spotlight? The “we have no moat and neither does OpenAI” essay was published very shortly afterwards. If anything you ought to expect them to be behind, since they took the position of making all the mistakes first so others (who already had the same or better tech) didn’t have to.
- stingraycharles 5mo ago
- gverrilla 5mo ago[dead]
- sega_sai 5mo agoIn the last couple of weeks, seeing all the announcements of new models by OAI, Anthropic and Chinese companies I was thinking if Google has something up their sleeve, but this news suggests otherwise.
- skybrian 5mo agoContext: a few weeks ago, Anthropic signed a deal to buy "multiple gigawatts of next-generation TPU capacity" from Google and Broadcom [1]. There have been several previous deals, too. Some people call this sort of thing a "circular deal", but perhaps a better way to think of it is as a very large-scale version of vendor financing? The simple version of vendor financing is when a vendor gives a retailer time to pay for goods they purchased for resale. This is effectively a loan that's backed by the retailer's ability to resell the goods. There's a possibility that the retailer goes broke and doesn't pay, but the vendor has insight into how well the retailer is doing, so they know if they're a good risk. Similarly, Google likely knows quite a lot about Anthropic because Anthropic buys computing services from Google for resale. They're making an equity investment rather than a loan, but the money will be coming back to Google, assuming Anthropic's sales continue to rise as fast as they have been. Also, if you own Google stock, some small part of that is an investment in Anthropic? [1] https://www.anthropic.com/news/google-broadcom-partnership-compute https://www.anthropic.com/news/google-broadcom-partnership-c...
- colechristensen 5mo agoIt could be legit, it could be a thickly veiled accounting fraud continuing the valuation inflation with fake deals that count money multiple times. Maybe a little bit of both.
- rnxrx 5mo agoLots and lots of vendor financing during the dotcom era, and it ended up being a material part of those vendors' own difficulties. Especially when service providers were concerned (e.g. the huge crash in optical in particular). Obviously it's not a perfect comparison, but you have to wonder how much of NVIDIA's income (for instance) is ultimately funded by its own money.
- zymhan 5mo agoTo be honest, I think "vendor financing" is still a very risky premise. Vendors may be positioned to know how a customer is doing, but they're also incentivized to overestimate how well a customer is going to perform. GE Capital (edit: and GMCA) is a great example of how seemingly reasonable vendor financing can cause the lender serious problems.
- cmiles8 5mo agoRegardless of if this is “vendor financing” or “circular financing” the history books are riddled with this sort of stuff ending very badly. It’s concerning that the only thing that seems to be keeping the AI bubble inflated at this point is money from the folks selling things to AI companies. That’s very much not a good sign no matter how you spin it. I’m a fan of AI and there’s clearly value to it… however that value seems completely out of whack with the money pumping into the ecosystem and at some point such irrational behaviors break.
- skizm 5mo agoWeren't there reports of Anthropic's stock trading on secondary markets at $1T valuation recently? Now Google invests at a $350B valuation. I get valuations are often times just smoke and mirrors, but this seems like a pretty big disconnect. What's going on there?
- mjuarez 5mo agoThere's always backroom negotiations going on with investments like these. Private valuations are normally hyped-up, and with the current batch of AI companies, 100x so. I assume Anthropic said something like "We'll give you 3% of our company for $30B, since we're valued at $1T now! So cheap!", and Google immediately came back with "Hell no. We'll give you even more, $40B... but it's for 11% of the company. Take it or leave it." With all the issues they're having, what leverage does Anthropic have at that point? Basically, Google made them an offer they couldn't refuse.
- nikcub 5mo agoAmazon and Google get discounts because they bring more than just cash and help solve a very immediate problem for Anthropic Great position to be in if you're Amazon and Google
- djaro 5mo agoIt's valued at $1T by people who do not have $1T.
- Cyclone_ 5mo agoThis feels weird to me. Why wouldn't Google want to go all in on Gemini? Unless they feel anthropic is pretty far ahead with claude?
- wirgil1 5mo agoIf you can get influence at your competitor you take it. It's valuable for both of them regardless
- cadamsdotcom 5mo agoWhen they said we’d soon have a circular economy I didn’t know it’d be made up of investments in AI companies that will get fed right back into inference.
- ecommerceguy 5mo agoMy AI use is significantly down. I'm sick of following Chat GPT "advise" only to learn how egregiously incorrect it is. Don't ask for DMV advice on registering an out of state car!
- maplethorpe 5mo agoI find that adding "don't make any mistakes" helps.
- dev1ycan 5mo agoHow many gigantic companies can join this before it crashes?
- ppqqrr 5mo agoi intend to invest $40B in my wife's pottery business; she will invest the same amount in my uber-for-dogs AI SaaS startup. our GDP is gonna be wild.
- zackho 5mo agogreat move by google
- alfiedotwtf 5mo agoFrom a comment below: > My main job isn't writing code but I try to keep Claude Code and OpenCode busy and churning away on something as close to 100% of the time as I can without getting in the way of my other priorities I’ve seen many people say this the past few weeks i.e that their daily job now is no longer coding and has flipped to being a full Claude Feeder making sure its always churning. As someone who uses Claude Code daily, I still find myself reading code and thinking more vs just shoveling coal as fast as I can into the Claude steam train. Am I doing things wrong?
- nghnam 5mo agoI think Google is using this to put pressure on OpenAI, while also getting some extra upside—like a possible path to acquire Anthropic later. And honestly, this could turn out to be bad news for OpenAI.
- freakynit 5mo agoFunny how the strongest challenge to Nvidia's near-monopoly(full monopoly?) is coming from Google, and not AMD. Still rooting for AMD to catch up too, especially if they can continue improving their software stack. They seem to be moving in the right direction.. though, they could benefit from speeding up a bit more. Google now has it's fingers in all the pies.. is successfully fully vertically integrated and now expanding horizontally.
- neltnerb 5mo agoAt this point I'll believe it when the money actually moves. There's been far to many "plans" and "commitments" and an awful lot of nothing actually happening.
- agnosticmantis 5mo agoMy $0.02: Competing against exp(t/2) + exp(t/2) is much much easier than exp(t/2+t/2)=exp(t). (If anthropic didn't exist, ØpenAI would suck up all the capital and talent in the room. Anthropic's existence has helped divide capital+talent that'd otherwise be gobbled up by the single fastest growing player.)
- derwiki 5mo agoIs that like Lyft and Uber?
- the_killer 5mo agoCome to Gehenna 666. Loosen your tongue. The tongue is Iniquity. ~ TK
- ulfw 5mo agoWhat a wonderful world our tech overlords are building for us leftover humans
- dyingg 5mo agoIts like when bit torrent and utorrent were the same thing. Right now the most popular frontier model makers are Anthropic, OpenAI, Google.
- threepts 5mo agoI work at google for chrome, I can assure you nobody in our team is using gemini over claude. Haha this is hilarious
- nothrowaways 5mo agoWhat do you even mean?
- _zoltan_ 5mo agoThat Claude is much better than Gemini for coding. The message you replied to was quite clear.
- mesonwarrior 5mo ago[dead]
- omrajguru 5mo agoGoogle investing in its own customer, Anthropic buying Google's compute. the money doesn't really leave the room.
- isodev 5mo agoIt’s ridiculous. Are those investments at least taxed in the US?
- simianwords 5mo agoThis sounds like a conspiracy theory if you don’t know how basic finance and economics work
- djaro 5mo agoYup. Even if Anthropic spends that $40B back at Google and thus the money ends up there, Google is still out of $40B worth of compute or whatever the profit margin is on that. It's why eating at your own restaurant is cheaper, but still not free.
- sovenyr 5mo agoThe money does leave the room — it gets converted into physical infrastructure that's increasingly rationed. Capital is not the constraint anymore. Dominion Energy can't serve new data center load in Loudoun County until 2028. NERC flagged grid emergency risk across most of CONUS. Phoenix is in active water rationing while hosting 47 hyperscale facilities. Helium supply (45% Qatar, used in EUV cooling) took real hits in 2026. Even if Google funds Anthropic, who funds the new transformers, the grid interconnect queue position, the water permit reviews? That part of the cycle isn't circular — it's hitting physics. Capital is fungible. Substations aren't.
- xyst 5mo agoCash injection disguised as an "investment"
- Intent_net 5mo agoIIRC Google already outright owns 15% of Anthropic.
- GiselW 5mo ago[dead]
- shevy-java 5mo agoThere is a lot of money in the Network of Evil. I am still upset at these companies for driving up the RAM prices. "Free market" has evident problems - companies are way too dominating here. Average Joe suffers from this price mafia, assuming he or she needs to purchase RAM now.
- DeathArrow 5mo agoI wonder what will this mean for Gemini? Will it survive?
- imrozim 5mo agoGoogle puting a 40 billions in anthropic but anthropic spends it Google's own servers. The money will come back to Google. Lol
- october8140 5mo agoThe bubble is so big.
- fnoef 5mo ago$40B. Insane. Imagine what could be done with this money to improve humanity. Instead, it’s spent on a fancy text generator that promises to eliminate most of the non mundane and physical jobs, as well as create autonomous killing machines, on top of burning the entire worlds electricity. Crazy.
- kakacik 5mo agoyou can say the same about every recent US war, and add one 0 to the sum. Or, more controversially, say EU green deal which decimated EU car industry and lost/will lose us few millions of jobs. Losses up to a trillion and nothing to show for that
- TranquilMarmot 5mo agoI know it may be a radical view, but less cars is always a good thing. Not too happy about the job losses, though.
- shimman 5mo agoThe job losses don't have to happen and it's a failure of the government in allowing it happen. There is always a job to be done if people are willing to work, there are always people willing to do certain types of work.
- kakacik 5mo agoNah they are just replaced by chinese cars, people won't drive less or buy less cars just because EU became noncompetitive. We just lost big part of economy to somebody else.
- simianwords 5mo agoTechnology and productivity have reduced more death than any redistribution
- fnoef 5mo ago
- souravroy78 5mo agoAre they done with so called state of the art Gemini models
- bandrami 5mo agoIf they're investing at the same valuation Anthropic had in their last round, what happened to all that previous money?
- dsecurity49 5mo ago"Google investing $40B in Anthropic while also competing against them is the most Silicon Valley thing I've ever seen. These companies will fund their own competition just to make sure they have a seat at the table when it wins. Also $800B valuation for a company that hasn't IPO'd yet?? We are so cooked."
- da_grift_shift 5mo ago>"Google investing $40B in Anthropic while also competing against them is the most Silicon Valley thing I've ever seen. These companies will fund their own competition just to make sure they have a seat at the table when it wins. Also $800B valuation for a company that hasn't IPO'd yet?? We are so cooked." Who are you quoting?
- nobita223 5mo agoso does that mean anthropic is going to using google tensor gpu chips ?
- reactordev 5mo agoGood, maybe they can do something about their awful limits cutting you off mid-generation.
- eolgun 5mo agoInteresting timing — most compliance tools in the enterprise space still treat AI infrastructure providers as black boxes. If Anthropic scales this way, SOC 2 and security questionnaires around AI vendors are going to become a much bigger deal for startups.
- mark_l_watson 5mo agoThis is an interesting conversation: some of you correctly pointing out that so much AI driven development is not having a positive effect on business profitability, and others correctly pointing out positive results that give evidence for great future progress. I have an unusual set of metrics for evaluating AI. I am old and comfortably retired but I still like to experiment with AI tools for updating many of my old (or ancient) open source projects and creating new projects. I am blown away by how good my dedicated Hermes Agent setup on a VPS and also running Google AntiGravity with Claude and Gemini are. Both systems are unbelievably good. I can only imagine how effective companies with a solid engineering process will be as appropriate roles for human and AI developers solidify. I can also imagine companies with a poor process and poor engineering taste will waste a lot of money.
- qwaG 5mo agoWhere is the software that is produced using the purported efficiency gains and why are you pulling up the ladder behind you? If you were in AI for such a long time, of course you are biased and want to see it succeed. Look at what has been written in open source since 2023. Very little. There are no efficiency gains and the incessant talk about prompts and AI just paralyzes the entire field. And people who love to talk have the ears of the managers.
- 1o1o1o1o1 5mo agoI plan on investing $20 per month into Anthropic as well.
- deferredgrant 5mo ago[flagged]
- fizlebit 5mo agoThe big bet here is that anthropic stays ahead of the curve and is the goto tool for businesses. The risk is disruption to that leader position, or that it can't sell all those tokens because the value/cost ratio is too lower for consumers of them. I suspect that disruption is the bigger risk because the tokens in my experience are valuable, so as they innovate we're betting the value of the tokens goes up and the cost comes down.
- arjunthazhath 5mo agoAt this stage google has almost become unbeatable! A giant that can never be defeated.
- 0xchamin 5mo agocircular economy???
- sjia 5mo agoSilicon Valley companies and individuals are interconnected, much like the Internet.
- hacker_88 5mo agoAI Bubble
- redoh 5mo ago[flagged]
- agentbc9000 5mo agothis wont stop the pay per token system being forced onto its users - lets see how much you'll be prepared to pay? Powerusers paying $15/$40 per day?
- mcmcmc 5mo agoTurns out AI is expensive… who knew? Giving it away for free was a predatory trap to create dependency. Now that they’ve captured enough market share they can try to cover their costs. The interesting question will be if it’s even even possible for them to turn a profit without a cartel or massive government subsidies.
- TranquilMarmot 5mo agoWhere I work we have people who are well past $40/day of Claude usage.
- agentbc9000 5mo agoChinese models bro $2 per million tokens - yes i am playing with some of these models
- mcmcmc 5mo agoAh yes, more corporate incest between direct competitors. Market consolidation is just what we need.
- boxingdog 5mo ago[dead]
- martinbfine 5mo agoThe money keeps moving like a hot potato
- 34ylsh 5mo ago[flagged]
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 5mo agoAlternative to archive.ph Text-only, no CAPTCHA, no Javascript, no DDoS on blogger, no geo-blocking x=https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-04-24/google-plans-to-invest-up-to-40-billion-in-anthropic echo url=$x|curl -K/dev/stdin \ |egrep -o "(type\":\"paragraph)|(type\":\"text\",\"value\":\"[^\"]+)" \ |sed '/Read More:/{N;d;};s/type\":\"paragraph/<p>/;s/.\{22\}//' \ |sed '1s/^/<meta charset=utf-8><meta name=viewport content=width=device-width>/' > 1.htm firefox ./1.htm
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 5mo agoQ: How many special characters, e.g., operators, whitespace or keywords, are in variable x A: Zero https://man.netbsd.org/sh.1 https://man.netbsd.org/sh.1 "Quoting Quoting is used to remove the special meaning of certain characters or words to the shell, such as operators, whitespace, or keywords."
- ur-whale 5mo agoNot quoting x anywhere ... ballsy