Anthropic is preparing for a major expansion of its AI infrastructure, aiming to secure access to up to one million of Google's TPUs (Tensor Processing Units) by 2026.
The company plans to invest "tens of billions" of dollars in this effort, which would add more than one gigawatt of new computing capacity. Anthropic reports serving over 300,000 business customers, and the number of large accounts—those spending more than $100,000 per year—has grown nearly sevenfold in the past year.
Krishna Rao, Anthropic's CFO, calls the relationship with Google a "longstanding partnership" that will deepen as the company expands its footprint. As the demand for Claude increases, so does the need for more computing power. "This expansion will help us serve this rapidly growing customer demand," Anthropic writes.
Chip partnerships with Amazon and Google
Even with this new capacity from Google, Amazon remains Anthropic's "primary training partner and cloud provider." Through the Rainier project, Anthropic already accesses a large compute cluster made up of hundreds of thousands of AI chips across multiple US data centers.
Anthropic also plans to invest in additional compute resources beyond Google. For now, its approach is more cautious than OpenAI's, which is targeting up to 16 gigawatts of compute in partnership with AMD and Nvidia alone. OpenAI is also developing its own AI chips with Broadcom.
Anthropic's deal with Google follows a familiar pattern in the AI industry: tech giants invest in startups, which then spend that capital on the cloud and hardware services of those same investors. The cycle boosts revenue and market caps. Both Google and Amazon have stakes in Anthropic.
Both OpenAI and Anthropic are locking in massive amounts of compute based on projected future earnings—a risky business model backed by cloud providers and chipmakers, since these announcements often drive up their stock prices. Still, some skeptics warn that a bubble may be forming, questioning whether these startups will actually generate enough revenue to cover the ongoing costs of all this infrastructure.
