Anthropic’s rapid growth helps explain the scale of the commitment. The company reached a $30 billion annualized revenue run rate in April, up from $1 billion in early 2025, with Claude capturing 32% of the enterprise API market. Eight of the Fortune 10 use the platform, and more than 1,000 customers now spend over $1 million annually, a figure that has doubled in recent months.
The deal follows a similar move by Amazon, which has committed up to $33 billion to Anthropic. Together, the investments place the two largest cloud providers in direct competition to secure the same AI company as a major customer. Anthropic has agreed to spend heavily on cloud infrastructure, including a pledge to allocate $100 billion to Amazon Web Services over the next decade, while also maintaining relationships with multiple hardware providers.
For Google, the compute agreement appears central to the strategy. Anthropic already runs workloads across Google TPUs, Amazon Trainium chips, and Nvidia GPUs. By expanding TPU access, Google is aiming to embed its hardware deeply into Anthropic’s operations, ensuring that a growing share of usage flows through its cloud platform. Claude is already distributed via Google Cloud’s Vertex AI service, where enterprise customers generate revenue for Google regardless of whether its own Gemini models are used.
The investment also lands as Google works to close performance gaps with Anthropic’s products. Internal efforts have focused on improving Gemini’s capabilities in areas such as coding, where Claude has gained traction. Google has continued to position itself as a full-stack AI provider, spanning chips, models, cloud infrastructure, and enterprise distribution, even as it increases reliance on a partner that competes directly with its in-house systems.
Regulatory scrutiny is likely to follow. U.S. authorities have raised concerns that partnerships between cloud providers and AI developers could reinforce the market power of large incumbents. Google’s ownership cap and lack of governance rights suggest the deal was structured with those concerns in mind, though the scale of the financial and infrastructure ties may still draw attention.
Anthropic has favored strategic investors that can provide compute resources rather than purely financial backers, a preference that has strengthened its ties to both Google and Amazon. The arrangement gives Google exposure to Anthropic’s growth through both equity and infrastructure revenue. If Anthropic meets its targets, Google increases its stake; if not, it still benefits from the underlying cloud usage.
The result is a partnership that blends competition and dependency. Google continues to develop Gemini while committing unprecedented resources to a rival whose products are gaining traction with enterprise customers.
This analysis is based on reporting from TNW | Anthropic.
Image courtesy of Unsplash.
This article was generated with AI assistance and reviewed for accuracy and quality.
