Google Cloud just announced that Anthropic has signed a major deal that will expand its use of the search giant’s TPU chips for training future Claude models. According to the press release, this will allow the AI company to use up to a million TPUs from Google, as well as access other cloud services that it offers, giving Anthropic over a gigawatt of compute capacity by 2026.
The company has already been using Google Cloud’s services since 2023, when it first signed a strategic partnership to use the latter’s infrastructure to train and run its models. Anthropic has since used Google Cloud’s platforms, including Vertex AI and Google Cloud Marketplace, to offer its Claude models to customers, including design and collaboration platform Figma, cybersecurity firm Palo Alto Networks, and AI code editor Cursor, among others.
“Anthropic and Google have a longstanding partnership, and this latest expansion will help us continue to grow the compute we need to define the frontier of AI,” Anthropic CFO Krishna Rao said. “Our customers — from Fortune 500 companies to AI-native startups — depend on Claude for their most important work, and this expanded capacity ensures we can meet our exponentially growing demand while keeping our models a the cutting edge of the industry.”
It makes sense for Anthropic to stick with its current provider, Google Cloud, when expanding its capacity, because its models and the engineers behind them are already used to Google’s system. Aside from that, it also offers great price-performance and efficiency, which will help with its $26 billion revenue target for 2026.
“Anthropic’s choice to significantly expand its usage of TPUs reflects the strong price-performance and efficiency its teams have seen with TPUs for several years,” said Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian. “We are continuing to innovate and drive further efficiencies and increased capacity of our TPUs, building on our already mature AI accelerator portfolio, including our seventh-generation TPU, Ironwood.”
Anthropic’s move to stay away from massive infrastructure investments means reducing its risk of laying out a lot of cash for hardware that will take years to materialize. However, that also puts it at the mercy of hardware providers, making it harder for the company to scale and making it prone to price fluctuations, especially if it does not have long-term contracts in place that will protect it from such instability. But with the massive data center build-out happening all over the world, it seems that this is a risk that the company may be willing to take, so it can focus more on its core products.
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