Alphabet gains on report that Anthropic’s committed to spending $200 billion on cloud services over the next 5 years
Shares of Google are catching a bid in postmarket trading after The Information reported that Anthropic plans to spend $200 billion on Google Cloud over the next five years, citing a person with knowledge of the situation.
That would amount to more than 40% of its $462 billion backlog as of the end of Q1, which nearly doubled from $240 billion in Q4.
The relationship between the two companies has been deepening in recent weeks, with Google reportedly planning to invest up to $40 billion in Anthropic, but this reports puts a firm price tag on how much the AI chatbot developer will be paying out to the hyperscaler.
Last year, when it was revealed that Oracle’s remaining performance obligations were dominated by OpenAI, the stock gave back some of its massive advance. Counterparty and concentration risk has been an overhang on the cloud giant ever since.
That’s a stark contrast to how traders are behaving today. It’s a sign of how Alphabet is seemingly on much more secure financial footing than Oracle (even after today’s debt offerings!), and also, probably, implies that Anthropic is a more reliable customer than OpenAI. In addition, as The Information noted, Google has more ways to make money off its relationship with Anthropic than Oracle does with OpenAI.
Anthropic has been a victim of its own success: the popularity of Claude Code and Cowork have revealed compute constraints and left users frustrated by caps. In response, the Claude developer has embarked upon a mad scramble for compute, striking or expanding deals with CoreWeave, Amazon, Google, and Broadcom.
OpenAI, on the other hand, is now billing the billions it’s burned on securing compute as a competitive advantage.