Anthropic at $965B Asks Google to Co-Sign Its Cloud Lease, the AI Rivalry Has Receipts

Anthropic has signed more than a dozen preliminary agreements to lease U.S. data centers with a combined capacity above 1 gigawatt and is in talks for Google to financially backstop the payments, according to people with direct knowledge of the matter reported by The Information. The arrangement, which would also draw on private credit from Apollo Global Management and Blackstone, would deepen the financial entanglement between the two artificial intelligence competitors, with Google standing behind Anthropic's obligations if the company cannot meet them. Neither Anthropic nor Google has confirmed the terms; Google told Reuters it does not comment on rumors or speculation, and Anthropic did not respond to requests for comment.

The talks come as Anthropic scales its own infrastructure to reduce reliance on the very cloud providers it competes against. The company has historically rented compute from Google Cloud and others, and operating its own facilities is intended to give it more control over cost and performance. In parallel, Anthropic is preparing to go public: it confidentially filed for a U.S. IPO earlier this month without disclosing the size or terms of the offering, following a late-May funding round that raised $65 billion at a $965 billion post-money valuation, a level that places it ahead of OpenAI by implied market value.

Google's exposure to Anthropic extends beyond a possible lease guarantee. The search company has committed up to $40 billion to Anthropic and co-designs some of the server chips the lab plans to use in its new facilities, even as its Gemini models compete with Anthropic's Claude across AI assistants, coding tools and enterprise software. The dual role of investor, chip partner and rival illustrates the mutual dependence that now defines the upper tier of the AI industry, where capital, compute and model deployment are increasingly shared across companies that also fight for the same customers.

That dependence is not limited to Google. Anthropic is reported to pay SpaceX, a competitor through xAI, $1.25 billion a month for AI compute, an arrangement that links two more rivals preparing to tap public markets. The pattern, of companies funding, supplying and competing with one another at the same time, is increasingly shaping how the next generation of AI infrastructure is financed and built.