Google said Friday it will invest up to $40 billion in Anthropic, the AI lab behind Claude, with $10 billion arriving as upfront cash at a $350 billion valuation and another $30 billion tied to performance milestones. The deal, first reported by Bloomberg, lands four days after Amazon poured another $5 billion into the same company.
What Google is actually paying for
Strip away the equity headline and this looks more like a compute deal in a trench coat. Alongside the cash, Google Cloud agreed to deliver 5 gigawatts of computing power to Anthropic over five years, with capacity coming online starting in 2027. That sits on top of the multi-gigawatt TPU deal Anthropic signed earlier this month through a three-way agreement with Google and Broadcom; a Broadcom filing pegged that capacity at 3.5 gigawatts.
The $350 billion valuation matches the price tag from Anthropic's February funding round. Investors in secondary markets have reportedly been chasing the company at $800 billion or more, so Google is, on paper, getting in below market. Whether that's a real discount or the appropriate price for a company struggling to keep its product online is the open question.
The cap-table is starting to look weird
Amazon and Google are now Anthropic's two largest outside backers and its two largest infrastructure suppliers, which is either ingenious or a governance nightmare. Amazon's commitment totals up to $33 billion across previous and new investments, paired with a separate pledge from Anthropic to spend more than $100 billion on AWS over the next decade, TechCrunch reports. Google's total commitment now sits at roughly $43 billion when prior investments are added in.
Both are funding the same competitor while competing with it themselves. Gemini and Claude are direct rivals. So are AWS Trainium and Google TPUs. The cleanest read is that no one trusts their own model team enough to skip hedging.
About that revenue number
Anthropic says its run-rate revenue has crossed $30 billion, up from roughly $9 billion at the end of 2025. Run-rate is an annualized snapshot, not actual annual revenue, and it inflates fast when a company is growing through enterprise contracts that haven't fully landed yet. Even with a generous discount, the underlying number justifies a lot of the financial gymnastics on display.
Most of that growth comes from Claude Code and enterprise developer tools. Anthropic disclosed earlier this month that more than 1,000 customers now spend over $1 million annually. The product works. The compute to serve it is the bottleneck, which is why a deal that comes packaged with gigawatts is more useful than one that doesn't.
Why now
Anthropic users have spent the past several weeks complaining about rate limits and Claude outages. OpenAI has publicly needled Anthropic for failing to secure enough compute. The Amazon top-up dropped Monday. The Google deal dropped Friday. None of that is coincidence.
Anthropic is reportedly weighing an IPO as soon as October. The first slice of Google's 5-gigawatt commitment is scheduled to come online in 2027.
