India’s largest private oil refiner Reliance Industries is reportedly halting purchases of Russian crude, following the U.S.’ decision to sanction Russia’s two largest oil companies, Rosneft and Lukoil.

Reliance has become a major buyer of Russian crude. In September, it purchased around 629,590 barrels of Russian crude per day from the two firms, out of India’s total imports of 1.6 million barrels per day, according to data by commodities data analytics firm Kpler.

Over the same month last year, Reliance purchased around 428,000 barrels per day of oil from the Russian companies.

In fact, India’s Russian crude imports used to account for less than 3% of its total crude import basket, but today account for one-third of India’s crude imports, experts say.

Reliance has not responded to CNBC requests for comment on reports that it is stopping the purchase of Russian crude.

It comes as the U.S. Treasury Department on Wednesday levied sanctions on Rosneft and Lukoil, citing Moscow’s “lack of serious commitment” to ending the war in Ukraine. The sanctions aim to “degrade” the Kremlin’s ability to finance its war, the U.S. department said, signaling more measures could follow.

If Reliance does halt Russian purchases, it will have “negative impacts on [Reliance’s] margin and profitability as Russian crude constitute more than 50% of [its] crude diet,” Pankaj Srivastava, SVP of commodity oil markets at market research firm Rystad Energy said in emailed comments.

He added that the availability of “similar crude is not an issue” and can be sourced from West Asia, Brazil, or Guyana, but Reliance is unlikely to get the same price as it does on Russian crude, as it has long-term deals with suppliers like Rosneft.

Last December, Reliance Industries signed a deal to import crude oil worth $12 billion-$13 billion a year from Russia’s Rosneft for 10 years, which would translate to roughly 500,000 barrels per day, according to a report by Reuters.

Other Indian refiners are also looking to cut imports of Russian oil. Weaning off Russian oil might raise India’s import bill, but it won’t be “as big a sticker shock as [it] might have been if crude was in the $70 or $80 range,” said Hari of Vanda Insights.

U.S. West Texas Intermediate futures were trading around $61.83 a barrel on Friday.

Experts also say the benefits of India cutting back on Russian oil purchases outweigh the downsides.

According to Natixis’ Senior Economist Trinh Nguyen, the arbitrage that Russian oil offered during the energy crisis has tapered off, and there is no need for India now to have significant purchases of Russian oil.

India’s Russian crude purchase has been a sore point in its trade relations with the U.S., which culminated in the U.S. imposing a total 50% tariff on Indian goods exported to the U.S..

With both state-owned and private refiners expected to halt purchase of Russian crude — a long-standing demand of U.S. President Donald Trump — the chances of India negotiating a mutually beneficial trade deal with the U.S. have increased.

— CNBC’s Ying Shan Lee contributed to this report 

Anthropic and Google officially announced their cloud partnership Thursday, a deal that gives the artificial intelligence company access to up to one million of Google’s custom-designed Tensor Processing Units, or TPUs.

The deal, which is worth tens of billions of dollars, is the company’s largest TPU commitment yet and is expected to bring well over a gigawatt of AI compute capacity online in 2026.

Industry estimates peg the cost of a 1-gigawatt data center at around $50 billion, with roughly $35 billion of that typically allocated to chips.

While competitors tout even loftier projections — OpenAI’s 33-gigawatt “Stargate” chief among them — Anthropic’s move is a quiet power play rooted in execution, not spectacle.

Founded by former OpenAI researchers, the company has deliberately adopted a slower, steadier ethos, one that is efficient, diversified, and laser-focused on the enterprise market.

A key to Anthropic’s infrastructure strategy is its multi-cloud architecture.

The company’s Claude family of language models runs across Google’s TPUs, Amazon’s custom Trainium chips, and Nvidia’s GPUs, with each platform assigned to specialized workloads like training, inference, and research.

Google said the TPUs offer Anthropic “strong price-performance and efficiency.”

“Anthropic and Google have a longstanding partnership and this latest expansion will help us continue to grow the compute we need to define the frontier of AI,” said Anthropic CFO Krishna Rao in a release.

Anthropic’s ability to spread workloads across vendors lets it fine-tune for price, performance, and power constraints.

According to a person familiar with the company’s infrastructure strategy, every dollar of compute stretches further under this model than those locked into single-vendor architectures.

Google, for its part, is leaning into the partnership.

“Anthropic’s choice to significantly expand its usage of TPUs reflects the strong price-performance and efficiency its teams have seen with TPUs for several years,” said Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian in a release, touting the company’s seventh-generation “Ironwood” accelerator as part of a maturing portfolio.

The company’s annual revenue run rate is now approaching $7 billion, and Claude powers more than 300,000 businesses — a staggering 300× increase over the past two years. The number of large customers, each contributing more than $100,000 in run-rate revenue, has grown nearly sevenfold in the past year.

Claude Code, the company’s agentic coding assistant, generated $500 million in annualized revenue within just two months of launch, which Anthropic claims makes it the “fastest-growing product” in history.

While Google is powering Anthropic’s next phase of compute expansion, Amazon remains its most deeply embedded partner.

The retail and cloud giant has invested $8 billion in Anthropic to date, more than double Google’s confirmed $3 billion in equity.

Still, AWS is considered Anthropic’s chief cloud provider, making its influence structural and not just financial.

Its custom-built supercomputer for Claude, known as Project Rainier, runs on Amazon’s Trainium 2 chips. That shift matters not just for speed, but for cost: Trainium avoids the premium margins of other chips, enabling more compute per dollar spent.

Wall Street is already seeing results.

Rothschild & Co Redburn analyst Alex Haissl estimated that Anthropic added one to two percentage points to AWS’s growth in last year’s fourth quarter and this year’s first, with its contribution expected to exceed five points in the second half of 2025.

Wedbush’s Scott Devitt previously told CNBC that once Claude becomes a default tool for enterprise developers, that usage flows directly into AWS revenue — a dynamic he believes will drive AWS growth for “many, many years.”

Google, meanwhile, continues to play a pivotal role. In January, the company agreed to a new $1 billion investment in Anthropic, adding to its previous $2 billion and 10% equity stake.

Critically, Anthropic’s multicloud approach proved resilient during Monday’s AWS outage, which did not impact Claude thanks to its diversified architecture.

Still, Anthropic isn’t playing favorites. The company maintains control over model weights, pricing, and customer data — and has no exclusivity with any cloud provider. That neutral stance could prove key as competition among hyperscalers intensifies.

WATCH: Anthropic’s Mike Krieger on new model release and the race to build real-world AI agents