Google, investing up to $40 billion in Anthropic... The "cloud war" in the generative AI market

Google has decided to invest up to $40 billion in the artificial intelligence startup Anthropic, further intensifying competition for leadership in the generative AI market around fundraising and assurances of cloud infrastructure.

According to Bloomberg News on the 24th (local time), using Anthropic’s $350 billion enterprise valuation as the baseline, Anthropic first received a $10 billion investment from Google, and could receive an additional up to $30 billion if it meets performance targets in the future. This valuation is the same as during the investment round in February this year. Google had previously invested $3 billion in Anthropic, and the companies’ cooperation has therefore been strengthened further.

The significance of this deal goes far beyond a simple equity investment. Anthropic is a competitor to Google in developing AI models, but in terms of the chips and cloud services needed to support actual operational deployment, it is also a customer of Google. Google Cloud plans to provide Anthropic with computing capacity on the scale of 5 gigawatts over the next five years, which is equivalent to the power generation scale of five nuclear power plants—an extremely large volume. Google also announced at the “Google Cloud Next” event held in Las Vegas in the United States on the 22nd to 23rd that its cloud platform will support using Anthropic’s AI model “Claude.” This shows that in the AI industry, beyond the ability to build excellent models, obtaining the massive computing resources required to run these models is equally critical.

Since this month began, funding from other major tech companies has also been pouring into Anthropic. Earlier this week, the company received a $5 billion investment from Amazon and plans to raise an additional up to $20 billion in the future. Based on this, in just the month of April 2026 alone, Anthropic has received investment commitments of up to $65 billion from Google and Amazon. The market believes that the backdrop for such a large inflow of capital is that Anthropic is preparing for its initial public offering. Industry watchers are paying attention to the possibility that Anthropic could push forward with a listing in the fourth quarter of this year, and some forecasts suggest that after going public, its enterprise value could jump to more than $800 billion. In particular, its competitive strength demonstrated in the enterprise AI market and coding tools, along with a comparatively steady financial structure, is driving investor sentiment.

However, there are also many concerns about this investment arrangement. Some analysts point out that after Anthropic receives investments from Google and Amazon, it in turn purchases cloud services from these two companies, a model that could intensify the so-called circular trading controversy. This is similar to the problems that NVIDIA faced when it invested in customers of its graphics processors. Even so, the current market atmosphere appears to be more inclined toward growth expectations than regulatory concerns. In fact, after this news broke, the stock of Alphabet, Google’s parent company, rose by about 1.5% around 3 p.m. Eastern Time in the United States, trading around the $344 level. This trend is likely to indicate that in the future AI industry, competition will not only be about technological strength, but will also revolve around stronger large alliances formed around capital strength, data centers, semiconductors, and cloud computing.