Google will invest up to $40 billion in Anthropic because the new normal for AI is investing in your enemy

May the rhythm not stop. Amazon announced an investment of 25,000 million in Anthropic a week ago, and four days later Google went even further. The Mountain View Company spoke on Friday of an investment of up to $40 billion in that same company. We insist: this is non-stop.

The money doesn’t stop flowing. In less than a week, two of the largest “cloud providers” in the world have committed to investing up to $65 billion in a company that, attention, is a direct competitor in the AI ​​segment. None have done it out of generosity, and here there is a lot of covering one’s back and, of course, circular financing.

This is the Google agreement. Google will invest $10 billion now considering that Anthropic’s valuation is between $350 billion and $380 billion. From there, it can invest another $30 billion linked to company performance milestones that have not been detailed.

What Google gains. In exchange for that investment, Google Cloud will provide an additional 5 GW of computing capacity from 2027, expanding the agreement that Anthropic had already announced with Google and Broadcom to contract 3.5 GW of computing in the form of access to their TPUs. Google already invested 300 million dollars in Anthropic in 2023, but months later he put it on the table another 2,000 million more and in 2025 another 1,000.

Anthropic is already worth a fortune. It is estimated that before this agreement its participation in Anthropic was around 14%, and with this new agreement that participation will evidently increase. Anthropic’s valuation has grown dramatically in recent months, and according to Bloomberg There are offers for a new investment round that would place its value at 800,000 million dollars, already at the level of the 850,000 million valuation that OpenAI is around. Its growth is overwhelming, and it is clear that today She is the pretty girl of the industry.

No one could wait. The speed with which these announcements have occurred is motivated in part by the competitive fear between Amazon and Google. Anthropic uses Trainium chips from Amazon and TPUs from Google: it needs both and they both know it. Every dollar those companies put into Anthropic is a business case for Claude’s clients to use AWS or Google Cloud, so it makes sense that both want to solidify that “preferential relationship” with the company that is conquering the enterprise market.

The circular financing model as a standard. This week’s agreements consolidate what many already consider as the new normal sector: hyperscalers invest in AI startups, and AI startups spend that money on the infrastructure of those hyperscalers. For example: Google Cloud grew 36% in revenue last year to $58.7 billion and Anthropic was most likely one of its heavy clients. The money Google invests in Anthropic comes back in the form of invoices, and the same goes for Amazon and Trainium.

But the investment has another reason. These investment agreements not only seek to strengthen ties with the most promising AI startup of the moment, but also have a significant stake in its shareholders. That’s even more striking, because both OpenAI and Anthropic They hope to go public before the end of the year and if so, Google and Amazon will have “bought cheap” their stake in a startup that is expected to skyrocket exceptionally once it becomes a public company.

Once again, this is a bet for the future. But there is also the other big reason: the majority of investors (be they funds or companies) do not want to be left behind in this race and are betting because everyone else is doing it too. It doesn’t matter that AI companies are losing money non-stop: the promise is that there will come a time (2029 or 2030) in which the trend will change. It is not certain that this will happen, of course, but OpenAI or Anthropic play with that card and use it to their advantage. We have the last example in Mythos, an Anthropic model that it’s so good (or so they say and some others) who prefer not to make it public. It’s once again selling expectations… and it works.

In Xataka | DeepSeek has just released a model that competes with Opus 4.6. It costs seven times less and runs on Chinese chips

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