Privately held startup Anthropic and Google parent company Alphabet (GOOGL) have struck a multibillion-dollar cloud computing deal.
The agreement provides artificial intelligence (A.I.) company Anthropic with access to up to one million of Google’s custom-designed Tensor Processing Units, or TPUs.
In a statement, the companies said the deal is expected to bring more than a gigawatt of A.I. compute capacity online in 2026.
Industry estimates peg the cost of a one gigawatt of data centre at around $50 billion U.S., with roughly $35 billion U.S. of that typically allocated to microchips and processors.
Anthropic’s Claude A.I. chatbot already runs on Google’s TPUs, as well as Amazon’s (AMZN) Trainium microchips, and Nvidia’s (NVDA) processors.
For Alphabet, the deal will boost sales of its Tensor Processing Units and help overall sales.
However, while Alphabet is powering Anthropic’s next phase of computing power, Amazon
remains the company’s biggest partner.
Amazon has invested $8 billion U.S. in Anthropic to date, more than double Google’s $3 billion U.S. equity stake in the startup.
GOOGL stock has gained 34% this year to trade at $253.08 U.S. per share.
