The Internet company, the search engine Google, will invest $ 40 billion in the capital of the Artificial Intelligence startup Anthropic.
The news was confirmed to AFP by the company itself, which cited that the investment is made in order to support its development.
The Alphabet subsidiary will immediately invest $10 billion based on Anthropic’s current valuation of $350 billion, while payment of the remaining $30 billion will depend on its performance.
Companies at the forefront of the AI race are engaging in a spending frenzy to secure enough capacity to develop and deploy their models. In early February, Anthropic announced it had raised $30 billion, one of the largest private equity deals in history.
On Monday, Amazon formally committed an additional $5 billion, having already contributed three rounds of funding totaling $8 billion. The Seattle-based group plans to buy back $20 billion worth of additional shares over the long term.
Although Amazon and its cloud computing arm, Amazon Web Services (AWS), are historic partners of Anthropic, the company is looking to diversify its business relationships and is entering into agreements with other groups. In late October, it agreed with Google to lease cloud services worth several tens of billions of dollars.
For its part, Anthropic’s major competitor, OpenAI, is setting even higher goals and expects to spend around $600 billion by 2030.
Anthropic and OpenAI are startups that do not foresee profitability for several more years, unlike Google or Meta, other competitors in the field of AI, whose main activity generates large profits.
