Google announced Friday that it will invest $10 billion immediately in Anthropic, the artificial intelligence startup behind the Claude chatbot, at a $350 billion valuation. The Alphabet Inc. unit could add another $30 billion if Anthropic meets certain performance targets, bringing the total potential commitment to $40 billion.

The deal expands a longstanding partnership between the two companies, which are both competitors and collaborators in the AI space. Google previously invested more than $3 billion in Anthropic, including $300 million in 2023 for about a 10% stake and an additional $2 billion later, giving it roughly a 14% ownership. Anthropic relies heavily on Google Cloud for infrastructure, including access to Google's tensor processing units, or TPUs, as alternatives to Nvidia's graphics processors.

Under the new agreement, Google Cloud will provide Anthropic with at least 5 gigawatts of TPU capacity over the next five years, scalable depending on needs. This builds on an April 6 announcement where Anthropic expanded ties with Google and chipmaker Broadcom for multiple gigawatts of next-generation compute starting in 2027, later specified as 3.5 gigawatts.

Anthropic, founded in 2021 by former OpenAI executives, including CEO Dario Amodei, has seen explosive growth. Its annualized revenue run-rate surpassed $30 billion this year, up from about $9 billion at the end of 2025, driven by demand for products like Claude Code. The company recently closed a $30 billion funding round in February at valuations between $350 billion and $380 billion and has secured additional commitments, including $5 billion from Amazon, with potential for more.

The investment comes amid an intensifying AI infrastructure race, where startups like Anthropic and OpenAI compete for massive compute resources to train and deploy advanced models. Anthropic's latest model, Mythos, released this month to select partners, underscores the need for expanded capacity amid surging demand and safety concerns. Google, whose Gemini models rival Claude, aims to bolster its position by supporting a key player while securing long-term cloud revenue.

Anthropic has not issued a dedicated announcement on its newsroom about the Google investment, but confirmed details to reporters. The company also recently partnered with CoreWeave for data center capacity and expanded collaboration with Amazon for up to 5 gigawatts of compute.