Google is in early discussions to deepen its investment in Anthropic, Business Insider has learned.
The new financing round could value Anthropic at more than $350 billion, according to a source familiar with the matter. The potential new deal, which is still being negotiated and evolving, could also take the form of a strategic investment in which Google would provide additional services. cloud computing services to Anthropic, a convertible bond or a priced financing round early next year, according to sources familiar with the matter.
It’s unclear how much Google would invest in this round or if there would be additional investors in this latest funding.
Anthropic and Google declined to comment.
Google has invested more than $3 billion in Anthropic, giving it a 14% stake in the company, according to the New York Times, citing court documents filed in March. In September, Anthropic raised $13 billion at a valuation of $138 billion, while OpenAI reached a valuation of $500 billion last month in a secondary sale that allowed employees to sell shares.
The latest discussions come as Anthropic and its main rival, OpenAI, maker of ChatGPT, embark on a multibillion-dollar race to dominate the models that power AI. At the same time, big tech companies are taking sides, with Amazon and Google backing Anthropic, while Microsoft and Nvidia have invested billions in OpenAI.
Anthropic was founded in 2021 by former OpenAI employeesand is best known for his Claude family of great language models.
Google and Anthropic announced massive cloud computing deal in October, worth tens of billions of dollars, which gives Anthropic access to up to a million Google-built tensor processing units, or TPUs, designed to accelerate machine learning workloads.
Amazon also invested $14 billion in Anthropic, which uses AWS custom chips to build and deploy its AI models.
Anthropic said last month that it remains “committed to our partnership with Amazon, our primary training partner and cloud provider.”
from Amazon Rainer Project, one of the world’s largest AI computing clusters, with nearly half a million Trainium2 chips, recently came online Claude.
Anthropic also uses NVIDIA GPUs to train and power its models.
