Google is writing Anthropic a $10 billion check today, and it's just the beginning. The tech giant has committed up to $40 billion in total — $10 billion in immediate cash at a $350 billion pre-money valuation (the same valuation as Anthropic's February fundraising round), with another $30 billion contingent on the AI startup hitting unspecified performance milestones. On top of that, Google is promising to deliver 5 gigawatts of new data center capacity via Google Cloud over the next five years.
This latest infusion brings Google's total investment in Anthropic to roughly $33 billion since 2022 — and the $10 billion immediate tranche is by far its largest single check yet. The deal comes just days after Anthropic announced a similarly massive agreement with Amazon: $5 billion upfront, $20 billion more in potential follow-ons, with Anthropic committing to purchase over $100 billion in chips and compute from AWS. That's right — both cloud giants are now betting heavily on the same AI company, and Google is still pushing ahead with its own rival Gemini model line.
Anthropic's annualized revenue has exploded from $9 billion at the end of last year to over $30 billion now. In February, the company closed a $30 billion raise at a $380 billion post-money valuation, led by Singapore's sovereign wealth fund GIC and Coatue, with Microsoft and Nvidia also participating. By mid-April, multiple VCs were reportedly trying to pile in at valuations above $800 billion, but Anthropic turned them down. Google's $350 billion pre-money valuation looks more like a strategic pricing tied to compute-for-equity — a discount compared to where the market was willing to go.
Anthropic is reportedly considering an IPO as early as October. With Google and Amazon both hitching their clouds to Claude, the question is whether they can keep the peace — and what happens to Google's own AI efforts. The company recently formed a strike team to close the coding gap with Anthropic, a direct admission that Claude is beating Gemini in agentic coding. Meanwhile, Anthropic locked down 5GW of AWS power to keep up with demand. It's a strange dance: Google is both Anthropic's biggest competitor and its biggest investor.