Google in pact with fund for TPU leasing JV: information

Google in pact with fund for TPU leasing JV: information

Google Expands AI Compute Partnership with Anthropic, Boosting TPU Leasing Commitments

Google Cloud has entered a significant multi-year agreement with artificial intelligence firm Anthropic to lease up to one million of its custom-designed Tensor Processing Units (TPUs), a move expected to inject tens of billions of dollars into Google's AI infrastructure division. The partnership, announced in October 2025, will expand Anthropic's access to Google's seventh-generation "Ironwood" TPUs, enabling the deployment of over a gigawatt of AI compute capacity by 2026. Industry estimates suggest that a single gigawatt-scale data center typically costs approximately $50 billion, with chips accounting for roughly 70% of that expenditure.

The deal underscores Anthropic's rapid growth, with the company reporting a $7 billion annual revenue run rate and serving over 300,000 business customers globally. Anthropic's CFO, Krishna Rao, emphasized that the expanded compute resources will support surging demand for its Claude AI models, including its coding assistant, Claude Code, which generated $500 million in annualized revenue within two months of launch.

While Google's TPUs play a critical role in Anthropic's infrastructure, the company maintains a diversified multi-cloud strategy, also leveraging Amazon's Trainium chips and Nvidia GPUs for specialized workloads. This approach allows Anthropic to optimize costs and performance while mitigating risks associated with single-vendor dependencies. Amazon remains Anthropic's largest cloud partner, having invested $8 billion to date and providing the custom-built Project Rainier supercomputer for model training.

Google's commitment to Anthropic includes a $3 billion equity stake and a recent $1 billion investment in early 2026, reflecting its broader strategy to compete with rivals like Nvidia and Amazon in the AI chip market. Analysts note that Anthropic's compute expansion could amplify AWS's growth trajectory, as Claude's enterprise adoption drives long-term cloud revenue.

The partnership highlights intensifying competition among hyperscalers to secure AI workloads, with Google positioning its TPUs as a cost-effective alternative to rival architectures. However, Anthropic's neutral stance— retaining control over model weights, pricing, and customer data—ensures it remains agnostic to cloud providers, a key factor in the evolving AI landscape.