Some people call this sort of thing a "circular deal", but perhaps a better way to think of it is as a very large-scale version of vendor financing? The simple version of vendor financing is when a vendor gives a retailer time to pay for goods they purchased for resale. This is effectively a loan that's backed by the retailer's ability to resell the goods. There's a possibility that the retailer goes broke and doesn't pay, but the vendor has insight into how well the retailer is doing, so they know if they're a good risk.
Similarly, Google likely knows quite a lot about Anthropic because Anthropic buys computing services from Google for resale. They're making an equity investment rather than a loan, but the money will be coming back to Google, assuming Anthropic's sales continue to rise as fast as they have been.
Also, if you own Google stock, some small part of that is an investment in Anthropic?
[1] https://www.anthropic.com/news/google-broadcom-partnership-c...
The risk is from this structure is mostly to do with how this affects market cap. Companies using the value of their shares to fund demand for their services.
That's a risk.
That's not what's happening here though. Google isn't using the value of its shares to fund demand. Google is using its own cash flow to fund this demand from Anthropic.
The question is whether Anthropic has demand from end users for the capacity they are buying from Google (that's a yes I guess) and whether that demand is profitable for Anthropic (that's a question mark).
The cash was just sitting on their balance sheet not increasing Google’s valuation, turning it into revenue is value creation.
The equity transfer is a bit murkier, Google I guess gets to mark this on their books according to Anthropic’s latest valuation, but isn’t this more of a volatility swap than conjuring market cap? Analysts are not going to apply $30b of future spend at current PE, they will additionally discount this by the P(Anthropic demand crashes). So it’s not like this just boosts their market cap for free.
Of course Google’s balance sheet now has higher vol equity instead of cash for their products.
Vendors may be positioned to know how a customer is doing, but they're also incentivized to overestimate how well a customer is going to perform.
GE Capital (edit: and GMCA) is a great example of how seemingly reasonable vendor financing can cause the lender serious problems.
To the extent that Google and Anthropic are competing for AI business, Google is somewhat hedged against Anthropic winning market share. They still get data center revenue and they own equity, so that’s a consolation prize.
On the other hand, it’s increasing Google’s investment in AI, in general.
> To be honest, I think "vendor financing" is still a very risky premise.
If anyone is interested to learn about the damage that the financialisation of General Electric (USA) brought upon itself, you can ask ChatGPT to tell you the story. It is too long to repeat here.
Here is a sample prompt that I used to remind myself:
> I am interested in the history of General Electric and the trouble that their financing units brought in the early to mid 2000s. Can you tell me more?So far both of these companies have shown they suck at support so we know that's not it. It could be that it might help Anthropic to leverage Gemini in their competition with OpenAI and Google will take compute commitments.
Anecdata: I'm finding a lot of my "type random question in URL/search bar" has decent top Gemini answers where I don't scroll to results unless I need to dive deeper.
Google crippling search to bolster AI is a dangerous game. But without people going to competitors, what's the recourse?
Arguably, too much of this kind of hedging is anti-competitive. But that doesn’t seem to be much of a problem yet?
OpenAI lead the game while they were best. Antrophic followed and got better. Now openAI is catching up again and also google with gemini(?) ... and the open weight models are 2 years behind.
Any win here seems only temporary. Even if a new breakthrough to a strong AI happen somehow.
But they also have access to an unimaginably large data set plus reach into people’s daily lives.
Seems more like partners for world domination.
I actually mentioned to a Google friend the other week that I wouldn't be surprised to see Google tipping the hat towards Anthropic soon so as to put a little more heat on OAI.
And the circularity makes the actual investment numbers fairly meaningless. They don't mind if they end up overpaying for future services, as long as they overpay each other equally.
And that was before these new investments. I wonder what they did? I suppose the remaining 1% is worth a lot more now.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/11/technology/google-investm...
What if AI is never good or cheap enough to reach significant profitability?
Maybe a little bit of both.
Obviously it's not a perfect comparison, but you have to wonder how much of NVIDIA's income (for instance) is ultimately funded by its own money.
Let's say Anthropic fails to pay it's debt, can Google take those TPU's back and make money from them?
~ TK
The amount of new revenue that I am personally able to create for my clients, using Claude models for dev, and Claude models inside the insanely agile products delivered, is astounding.
If I was not currently experiencing this myself, and someone told me that this was possible, I would be calling them names.
If we get to an end-state of monopoly/duopoly at this game, then we are truly screwed.
I was just stating my current use and revenue path. Anthropic has insane velocity, in April of 2026.
Will you have the hardware to run them? Perhaps. Will enough of Anthropic's/OpenAI's large enterprise customers have the hardware to run them and the money/desire to have their own internal teams set up and maintain them?
I think Deepseek is already there.
The math is pretty simple, and it's easy to justify still paying the price even if it goes up 10 fold, when compared to hirering more resources its still cheap.
So I guess having multiple players and competition in the market is the key?
Chinese models like Deepseek v4 are as good and 10 times cheaper. You can even run Deepseek locally. So no, cheap AI wont be over. Just the US investors won't be able to profit off of the artificial bubble that is there now but wont be in the future.
100% agree. I have been trying to tell everyone to build their ideas, and exploit this environment where 100B of VC money into OpenAI/Anthropic = some percentage of money invested into your idea. This is the golden era of building! The music is gonna stop soon. Build now ffs!
It is likely that 99% of the value created by Anthropic / OpenAI / friends will go the end user. Which is great news.
It's like insane hype marketing speak. "insanely agile products delivered" like huh?
I believe that I am more of an AI realist. The agentic dev tools are really helping me out, but if I could wave a magic wand to make AI go away for a hundred years, I would do it.
I really hope that we can all laugh at how wrong I was.
However, I believe that the horrors will likely outweigh the benefits. Our global society/political systems are not ready for Stasi as a Service, mass unemployment, or any of this impending crap storm.
I get that it's tedious to sit on tech forums listening to an endless stream of people insisting that suchandsuch technology is world-changing. Many people and probably most people who say that are wrong. But sometimes the world really does change.
But all progress points to a commodification of foundation models--Google first named it as "we have no moat, neither does anyone else." So there must be some secondary play driving this, right? Hardware sales? Hedging for search ad revenue?
Still feels mispriced. I think asset inflation leaves too much money desperate for the Next Big Thing.
Although I doubt this will stop them if they think it’s advantageous…
> In September 2025, Google is in talks with several "neoclouds," including Crusoe and CoreWeave, about deploying TPU in their datacenter. In November 2025, Meta is in talks with Google to deploy TPUs in its AI datacenters.
As a user and a consumer, I don't want them to have a moat. Moat means pseudo-monopoly. That is the exact opposite of what we want.
Only the investors and owners want a moat, to keep others out.
So what they're doing? They're competing. Good.
Because they are investors, VCs, or startup founders who hope to establish their own moats.
Users and consumers can get a lot of useful information from HN, but it's important to keep the local demographics in mind.
That's why it's interesting to try to pick apart where the moat is.
Also those personalities, quirks and choices accumulate. A lot of people talk about using Claude Code and Codex for different things. This is 100% my experience. Some people make better models, but on the top 3, there are often differences that are fixed only by switching between them. If I feel the need to switch between them, then there are significant enough differences and those differences will accumulate.
The integration of LLMs with tools and data via agent harnesses has created the opportunity for a real moat. As these products start differentiating, the moats will develop to be significant.
No YouTube competitor can rise because ad blocking is so pervasive and celebrated. People think (selfishly) that ad blocking is some niche thing, the but the reality is that it's around 30% on average, and up to 70% if you have a tech literate audience.
So we have paid competitors, like nebula and curiosity stream, but those are essentially dead because they have to compete with "free" YouTube.
The internet is, pretty predictablely, totally unwilling to look in the mirror.
That kind of insane growth & demand is unprecedented at that scale.
https://www.anthropic.com/news/google-broadcom-partnership-c...
Given the fact that both Altman and Amodei are pathological liars, there's absolutely no reason to believe that Anthropic has $30B ARR.
I agree about the core motivation behind these deals, however I'm skeptical as to how "suddenly" we'll see substantial improvements. Despite their size, I'd be surprised if Google or Amazon had uncommitted chunks of Anthropic-scale, top-tier AI compute sitting around waiting to be activated.
They're already over-subscribed and waiting for new data centers (and power plants) to come online. I suspect Anthropic will get a modest amount of new capacity right away with more added over coming quarters. These two deals don't change the total amount of AI compute available on planet Earth over the next 18 months. Anthropic parting with high-value equity has now made them the new highest bidder for an already over-bid resource. I suspect the net impact will be Amazon & Google pushing prices even higher on everyone else as they reallocate compute to their new top whale.
I doubt it was idle capacity. But for a chunk of equity in Anthropic I imagine they are willing to deprioritize other, possibly internal, uses. Certainly anything that's not contractually obligated could be on the chopping block.
Is that not down to this? https://www.anthropic.com/engineering/april-23-postmortem
AI is in such desperate need to adopt software-hardware co-development practices, it's infuriating watching the industry drag its feet about it. We are wasting so much electricity and absolutely wrecking the "free" market just because these companies are incentivized to work at an unsustainable breakneck speed in getting shit to market.
So from that point of view you can indeed look at it as the entire value of the economy should be invested into AI companies.
The question is when will we get there.
If the answer is tomorrow, money means nothing and none of these investments matter. If the answer is 30 years, well lots of money to be made up until the inflection point of machines being able to design, build, and repair themselves.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panic_of_1873#Factors
"In the United States, the panic was known as the "Great Depression" until the events of 1929 and the early 1930s set a new standard.[2]"
What are you counting in this category?
My neighbors just gave Ford $60k. It'll be a while until my neighbor gives Anthropic $60k.
If you’re using it for personal work, why is $100 worth it?
You'll notice that all the really big deals have fallen through, because they're based on promises and meeting objectives that can't be met. So it's likely that there will be really big writeoffs but not a huge implosion like 2001/2008. The real losers will be the retail investors who put all their money in a handful of stocks at ridiculous valuations.
We need to run a SotA coding agent basically 24/7 uninterrupted and so far we didn’t find an easy solution for this (you can get provisioned TPUs for Gemini on GCP but it costs a fortune).
Surely that’s possible for under $5k a month? $10k?
Why should anyone feed the SV AI bubble if they can just use cheap Chinese models, even locally if they want to...
anthropic is the anchor external customer of tpu's and nvidia is worth more than all of google. If tpu's actually breakout as a viable alternative over the next few years for multiple clients the business could easily be worth as much as search, maybe more.
If only Apple could pass the favor forward. But no, they can't be bothered to invest even a single million in Asashi Linux to benefit their own hardware.
The tech is great but valuations are out of control. It's cheaper to keep valuations high through these circular financing deals, rather than to allow for any deflation.
Especially in those days Microsoft was both a platform for software to run on, and a maker of software, and being flexible to emphasize one or the other aspect depending on the way the market is... has been good for them.
Or, more controversially, say EU green deal which decimated EU car industry and lost/will lose us few millions of jobs. Losses up to a trillion and nothing to show for that
Was this meaningful for humanity? Keeping 20% of the population in bondage because we didn't want to upset the productivity gains of slavers in the south? All progress IS progress after all right?
Government welfare programs have done more to decrease poverty than anything else in the history of human existence. Also one doesn't have to go back in time 200+ years either to see the massive failures of neoliberal economics. Who thinks their lives are better because they have slightly faster phone while they continue to not afford healthcare, can't educate themselves, provide for children, or own homes.
You think 50% of the population seeing their lives materially decrease is meaningful? Good grief, do you honestly care more about trinkets than children? Actually don't answer that for the sake of your soul.
This money could be invested in universal healthcare, or into AI research for medicine. But hey, I guess replacing developers and generating slop is more beneficial to our society.
And it may very well be bad news for OpenAI.
including the option to acquire Anthropic.
They're worth $1 trillion in private market. If they IPO today, I'm willing to bet my house that the hype will drive them to $2 trillion market cap or 50% of Google's marketcap.
OpenAI and Anthropic will be the biggest IPOs ever - bigger than SpaceX. That's my prediction.
I have feeling that Dario is not the type of man who would want to be acquired and then have Google's CEO telling him what to do.
The drama on HN alone would last for days. Twitter would implode in on itself.
Nah, see Meta
The software will only improve for so long before it hits a wall. The best models were just a proxy for early mainstream market adoption, keeping your head above the water … plus some useful marketing hype about longshots for developing something bigger than LLMs (“AGI”).
People who work in tech are biased to obsess about the technical side and short term uptime/performance outrage. Despite that being mostly just standard immature market issues.
Anthropic (all ex Open AI) knew the negatives of the deal, so they made a slightly better deal with AWS, not a full lock in. They also grounded it in hardware from the start, ie. being the flagship customer for Trainium, the flagship customer for external usage of TPU's.
If anything you ought to expect them to be behind, since they took the position of making all the mistakes first so others (who already had the same or better tech) didn’t have to.
OpenAI was Anthropic. Anyone involved in actually developing GPT jumped ship when Altman performed his coup.
this is insane. on the secondary market the valuation is 2-3x that. what gives?
Google's deal from prior rounds likely lets them buy in at the same valuation other investors get every round, so they're just getting the February valuation.
Amazon did almost the same thing last week, at the same valuation.
If you gave anthropic 10b cash they couldn't get chips in the 0-6mo timeframe at scale. Anthropic is suffering reputational damage due to choices they have to make around capacity constraints.
Google, AWS, and Azure are the only people who can help them so they hold the cards, thus the good terms.
It is not uncommon to keep a round open after the formal announcement for a bit so that few investors who could not close for whatever reason are part of it. It can be hard to line up everyone at the same time, especially when they are public companies.
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Specific to your point on why valuation can be lower than market at the same time - Goods(and stocks) while feel to be homogeneous, divisible, fungible, they are not. Size can value of its own.
A block of 10% shares may be worth more (or less) than unit share price, because them being available together has a property of its own, making it either more desirable when someone wants to acquire or harder to sell because there is not enough demand if all of them get dumped at the same time [1]
In this deal terms, just cause few ten millions are trading at $850B, or some investors can put in say $1-2B doesn't mean you can raise $40B at the same valuation.
There isn't depth in the market to raise $65B (including the AMZN deal) at $850B valuation. There is always some demand at any price point in the demand supply curve, you will probably find few people who will buy few shares at $10T, or $100T or some ridiculous number but that doesn't mean you can raise a large round on that.
Strictly speaking it is not even $350B per se, i.e. Google and AWS benefit from this as vendors. It very much like vendor financing with convertible debt. Meaning it is worth that much to them, but not to you and me because we are not getting some of the money back as sales that boosts are own stock.
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[1] In the same vein, price can also depend on what you are getting in return, hard immediate dollars is the highest value. However if you are getting shares in return, you can usually negotiate a premium depending on risk of the shares you are getting.
The recent SpaceX - Cursor deal is a good example, any founder would likely take say $10B all cash offer over the $60B from SpaceX, or price would be closer to cash if it GOOG, AMZN, APPL shares instead - proven deeply liquid market etc.
I don’t know what to make of it
For example, you can buy KLM Air france for less than $3B.
It is a profitable business that does $30B in sales and $1B in profit. (and has been profitable since for the past 4-5 years)
I don’t think that’s the ultimate cause of the turnaround in fortunes. But it strikes me, at least from the investor and potentially urban-consumer perspectives, as a pivotal moment in both companies’ fortunes.
Ant's recent rise has little to none to do with retail subscribers, it is Claude Code with Opus 4.5+, followed by their Mythos stunt
I would say the flood of $20 Claude Subscribers due to news cycle backfired on them, now everyone is getting worse outputs and exposed their shortage on compute, which they can't fix anytime soon.
Pretty much everyone I know has both cc and codex now, just because how unreliable cc has become.
lol hes barely done anything, but sometimes that is all that's necessary when a bozo opponent is hell-bent on screwing things up. He didn't get fired the first time for no reason.
The money does leave the room — it gets converted into physical infrastructure that's increasingly rationed. Capital is not the constraint anymore.
Dominion Energy can't serve new data center load in Loudoun County until 2028. NERC flagged grid emergency risk across most of CONUS. Phoenix is in active water rationing while hosting 47 hyperscale facilities. Helium supply (45% Qatar, used in EUV cooling) took real hits in 2026.
Even if Google funds Anthropic, who funds the new transformers, the grid interconnect queue position, the water permit reviews? That part of the cycle isn't circular — it's hitting physics.
Capital is fungible. Substations aren't.Great position to be in if you're Amazon and Google
I assume Anthropic said something like "We'll give you 3% of our company for $30B, since we're valued at $1T now! So cheap!", and Google immediately came back with "Hell no. We'll give you even more, $40B... but it's for 11% of the company. Take it or leave it." With all the issues they're having, what leverage does Anthropic have at that point?
Basically, Google made them an offer they couldn't refuse.
It's more understanding for Amazon or Microsoft to make such an investment, because they're not as competitive in the model space.
Why the euphemism? What Anthropic did was an aggressive degradation of their model to save compute, and it's not just “perceived downtrend”, Anthropic themselves have acknowledged the quality of service degradation.
(If anthropic didn't exist, ØpenAI would suck up all the capital and talent in the room. Anthropic's existence has helped divide capital+talent that'd otherwise be gobbled up by the single fastest growing player.)
~ TK
if it runs of out of cash - then it's bad for the whole industry.
same as OpenAI. so all players - will provide cash & compute to keep them going.
Text-only, no CAPTCHA, no Javascript, no DDoS on blogger, no geo-blocking
x=https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-04-24/google-plans-to-invest-up-to-40-billion-in-anthropic
echo url=$x|curl -K/dev/stdin \
|egrep -o "(type\":\"paragraph)|(type\":\"text\",\"value\":\"[^\"]+)" \
|sed '/Read More:/{N;d;};s/type\":\"paragraph/<p>/;s/.\{22\}//' \
|sed '1s/^/<meta charset=utf-8><meta name=viewport content=width=device-width>/' > 1.htm
firefox ./1.htmA: Zero
"Quoting
Quoting is used to remove the special meaning of certain characters or words to the shell, such as operators, whitespace, or keywords."
Not sure if it’s going to be good enough to replace IDEs with neatly integrated superior models.
Didn't Amazon AWS do the same recently?
I have an unusual set of metrics for evaluating AI. I am old and comfortably retired but I still like to experiment with AI tools for updating many of my old (or ancient) open source projects and creating new projects. I am blown away by how good my dedicated Hermes Agent setup on a VPS and also running Google AntiGravity with Claude and Gemini are. Both systems are unbelievably good.
I can only imagine how effective companies with a solid engineering process will be as appropriate roles for human and AI developers solidify. I can also imagine companies with a poor process and poor engineering taste will waste a lot of money.
If you were in AI for such a long time, of course you are biased and want to see it succeed.
Look at what has been written in open source since 2023. Very little. There are no efficiency gains and the incessant talk about prompts and AI just paralyzes the entire field. And people who love to talk have the ears of the managers.
How much of this goes back to Google as cloud spend?
Google may reckon they can't (yet) reconcile their vision of Gemini with the raw coding performance of Claude and Codex.
Who are you quoting?
Still rooting for AMD to catch up too, especially if they can continue improving their software stack. They seem to be moving in the right direction.. though, they could benefit from speeding up a bit more.
Google now has it's fingers in all the pies.. is successfully fully vertically integrated and now expanding horizontally.
> My main job isn't writing code but I try to keep Claude Code and OpenCode busy and churning away on something as close to 100% of the time as I can without getting in the way of my other priorities
I’ve seen many people say this the past few weeks i.e that their daily job now is no longer coding and has flipped to being a full Claude Feeder making sure its always churning.
As someone who uses Claude Code daily, I still find myself reading code and thinking more vs just shoveling coal as fast as I can into the Claude steam train. Am I doing things wrong?
I am still upset at these companies for driving up the RAM prices. "Free market" has evident problems - companies are way too dominating here. Average Joe suffers from this price mafia, assuming he or she needs to purchase RAM now.
And with cashback through gcp usage!
There's been far to many "plans" and "commitments" and an awful lot of nothing actually happening.
It’s concerning that the only thing that seems to be keeping the AI bubble inflated at this point is money from the folks selling things to AI companies. That’s very much not a good sign no matter how you spin it.
I’m a fan of AI and there’s clearly value to it… however that value seems completely out of whack with the money pumping into the ecosystem and at some point such irrational behaviors break.