Flashspoter - In a strategic move that shocked the technology market, Google officially announced an investment of up to 40 billion US dollars or the equivalent of around Rp650 trillion to an artificial intelligence (AI) company from the United States, Anthropic. The deal comes just weeks after Amazon announced a similar $ 25 billion commitment. This phenomenon shows that competition and cooperation in the AI industry go hand in hand very intensely.
The initial investment of 10 billion US dollars will soon be liquid with the valuation of the company reaching 380 billion US dollars. The remaining US $ 30 billion is contingent, depending on the achievement of specific performance targets by Anthropic in the next few years. This move makes Google one of the biggest financial backers for startups that are also its direct competitors in the large language model market, especially through Gemini products.
This phenomenon is unique in that two giants, Google and Amazon, openly finance the same competitors. Anthropic is known for its Claude model that excels in coding through a tool called Claude Code. The popularity of this tool has soared dramatically among developers, so Anthropic's annual revenue shot up from $ 9 billion at the end of 2025 to more than $ 30 billion today.
The key to all these investments is not just equity, but access to computing infrastructure. Anthropic agreed to use Google's own Tensor Processing Units (TPUs) and Amazon's Trainium chips. In return, Google provides 5 gigawatts of computing capacity that becomes available in 2027, while Amazon provides almost 1 gigawatt through their chips by the end of this year.
These investments form the “circular deal " pattern that is now the hallmark of the AI industry. Anthropic got fresh funding, then spent most of its funds on renting servers and buying chips from the same investors. This creates a revenue stream for Google Cloud and Amazon Web Services, while securing long-term customers. In other words, the money invested goes back to the investor's own ecosystem.
In the past three months, Anthropic has signed multi-year agreements with Broadcom and CoreWeave for next-generation TPU capacity. The company even plans to build a $ 50 billion data center in the United States. This shows that Anthropic not only wants to be a developer of AI models, but also an infrastructure player.
The peculiarity of Google and Amazon investments is a phased funding scheme based on performance milestones. Unlike traditional venture funding, this structure allows investors to minimize risk while the startup retains a strong incentive to innovate. Google does not pay $ 40 billion at once, but rather opens the way for up to an additional $ 30 billion if Anthropic shows remarkable user growth, revenue or computing efficiency.
This strategy was also a response to OpenAI's criticism of Anthropic for not having enough computing capacity. With a massive flow of funding and capacity from Google and Amazon, Anthropic can provide the antithesis of those criticisms while accelerating AI research without having to rely on rare and expensive Nvidia chips. As a result, the global software stock market experienced a sharp decline when Anthropic released an AI agent plugin "Cowork" that automates complex programming tasks.
The $ 40 billion investment from Google is not just a capital injection, but also a win-win extension of the AI computing ecosystem. This scenario ensures that competition at the AI model level continues, but at the infrastructure level, collaboration is even closer. This is the new model of 21st century technology competition: enemies in the product market, but partners in the data center.