According to sources familiar with the situation, Anthropic PBC is negotiating a contract with Google, a division of Alphabet Inc., that would give the artificial intelligence firm access to more processing capacity worth tens of billions of dollars.
According to the persons, who requested not to be identified because the information is confidential, the not-yet-finalized proposal calls for Google to provide Anthropic with cloud computing capabilities. According to one of the sources, the agreement would enable Anthropic to use Google’s tensor processing units, or TPUs, which are the company’s processors specifically intended to speed up machine learning tasks. Google used to be a cloud provider and investor in Anthropic.
Google and Anthropic chose not to comment. Discussions are still in their early phases, so specifics may change. Following Wednesday’s market opening in New York, Google’s stock increased by up to 2.3%, while Amazon.com Inc., a cloud provider and Anthropic investor, had a 1.5% decline.
Established in 2021 by former OpenAI staff members, Anthropic is a San Francisco-based company best known for its Claude family of big language models, which rival OpenAI’s GPT models. Similar to its competitors, Anthropic has been collecting large amounts of money to stay ahead of the AI race, which industry executives warn will need more funding for research and innovations in addition to customer demand.
About a month after finishing a $13 billion capital round, Anthropic recently had early funding negotiations with MGX, an investment business located in Abu Dhabi. Fidelity Management and Research Co., Lightspeed Venture Partners, and Iconiq Capital served as co-leads in the transaction, which roughly quadrupled Anthropic’s value to $183 billion, including funds raised.
Anthropic had previously received around $3 billion from Google, which had promised to spend $2 billion in the AI business in 2023 and $1 billion earlier this year. Anthropic, a significant user of Amazon’s proprietary AI processors and a big AI client of Amazon Web Services, has received an investment commitment of around $8 billion from Amazon.