Google agrees to new $1 billion investment in Anthropic
Dario Amodei, Anthropic CEO, speaking on CNBC’s Squawk Box outside the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland on Jan. 21st, 2025.
Gerry Miller | CNBC
Google has agreed to a new investment of more than $1 billion in generative AI startup Anthropic, a source familiar with the situation confirmed to CNBC.
The fresh funding builds on Google’s past investments of $2 billion in Anthropic and 10% ownership stake in the startup, as well as a large cloud contract between the two companies. Anthropic is most well known for its Claude AI chatbot.
The agreement comes as Anthropic, one of the key players in Silicon Valley’s artificial intelligence arms race, is in late-stage talks to raise a funding round of $2 billion at a $60 billion valuation led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, CNBC reported earlier this month.
In December, Anthropic’s revenue hit an annualized $1 billion, which was an increase of roughly 10x year over year, the source said. The company’s revenue comes primarily from enterprise sales.
Financial Times was first to report Google’s investment.
Anthropic, which has been backed heavily by Amazon, was founded by former OpenAI research executives. It launched Claude in March 2023, and like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini, Claude has exploded in popularity as businesses incorporate generative AI chatbots across sales, marketing and customer service functions.
The generative AI market, which includes Anthropic and OpenAI as well as Google, Amazon, Microsoft and Meta, is predicted to top $1 trillion in revenue within a decade. Amazon and Microsoft, which is OpenAI’s principal investor, are backing generative AI startups with hefty investments as well as developing their own technologies.
Amazon announced that it would invest an additional $4 billion in Anthropic in November. That brought Amazon’s total investment in the startup to $8 billion. Amazon remains a minority investor, Anthropic confirmed to CNBC at the time, and does not have a board seat.
As part of that investment, Amazon Web Services became Anthropic’s “primary cloud and training partner.” Anthropic has used Amazon Web Services’ Trainium and Inferentia chips to train and deploy its largest AI models since then.
Anthropic ramped up its technology development throughout last year, and in October, the startup said that its AI agents were able to use computers like humans can to complete complex tasks. Anthropic’s Computer Use capability allows its technology to interpret what’s on a computer screen, select buttons, enter text, navigate websites and execute tasks through any software and real-time internet browsing, the startup said.
The tool can “use computers in basically the same way that we do,” Jared Kaplan, Anthropic’s chief science officer, told CNBC in an interview at the time. He said it can do tasks with “tens or even hundreds of steps.”
OpenAI reportedly plans to introduce a similar feature soon.
Anthropic debuted Claude 3.5 Sonnet, its more powerful AI model, in June, and the startup rolled out Claude Enterprise, its biggest new product since the launch of its chatbot, in September.
WATCH: Anthropic CEO: More confident than ever that we’re ‘very close’ to powerful AI capabilities
Amazon on Wednesday unveiled a new robotic system that’s capable of performing multiple tasks at once in the company’s warehouses.
The system, called Blue Jay, is made up of a series of robotic arms that are suspended from a conveyor belt-like track. Those arms are tipped with suction-cup devices that allow them to grab items of varying shapes and sizes.
Blue Jay combines “what used to be three separate robotic stations into one streamlined workplace that can pick, sort, and consolidate in a single place,” Amazon said in a blog.
The robotic system’s goal is to assist employees with otherwise strenuous tasks “while creating greater efficiency in less physical space,” the company said.
Amazon is testing Blue Jay at one of its warehouses in South Carolina. So far, the company has observed that the system is able to pick, pack, stow and consolidate “approximately 75% of items we store at our sites.”
Blue Jay joins a growing fleet of robotic machinery being deployed across Amazon’s legions of warehouses. Over the past several years, Amazon has debuted robots capable of handling different tasks, ranging from removing items from shelves to sorting boxes. In May, it debuted “Vulcan,” a robotic system that has a sense of touch.
Amazon’s warehouse automation efforts were largely jumpstarted by its $775 million acquisition of Kiva Systems in 2012.
The announcement comes as Amazon’s warehouse automation has come under growing scrutiny, particularly over how the technology is impacting its sprawling frontline workforce.
The New York Times on Tuesday published an investigation showing that Amazon’s automation team expects that it can avoid hiring more than 160,000 people in the U.S. by 2027, amounting to savings of about 30 cents on every item that Amazon packs and delivers. The report was based on interviews and internal strategy documents, the Times said.
In response to the report, an Amazon spokesperson told CNBC that the documents offer an “incomplete and misleading picture of our plans.”
“In this instance, the materials appear to reflect the perspective of just one team and don’t represent our overall hiring strategy across our various operations business lines — now or moving forward,” the spokesperson said in an email.
As the nation’s second-largest private employer, Amazon’s automation playbook could become a bellwether for the broader job market and other corporations. The company had more than 1.54 million employees globally at the end of the second quarter. That figure excludes delivery drivers, which are contracted through third-party firms.
The company on Wednesday said that employees remain “at the center” of its robotics development. Amazon said its goal is to “reduce physically demanding tasks, simplify decisions and open new career opportunities” for workers.
Amazon has sought to highlight how increasing automation in its facilities will lead to employees adopting “more rewarding” roles within the company. It offers an apprenticeship program in mechatronics and robotics, which involves honing skills around maintaining and monitoring robotic machinery.
WATCH: Meet Vulcan, Amazon’s new stowing robot that can feel what it touches
Applied Digital said on Wednesday that it signed a $5 billion infrastructure lease agreement with a U.S. hyperscaler.
Shares of the data center company dropped more than 7% following the announcement, continuing a recent slumped that’s sent the stock down over 20% in the past week. The stock has still almost quadrupled this year.
The lease announced on Wednesday is for about 15 years and will deliver 200 megawatts of capacity at the company’s Polaris Forge 2 campus in North Dakota. It brings the company’s total leased capacity to 600 megawatts at its two Polaris Forge campuses.
Across the tech industry, the major cloud providers and other internet giants are rapidly investing in artificial intelligence infrastructure and announcing plans for massive new data centers to handle an expected surge in demand. Applied Digital didn’t name its partner for the latest agreement, just disclosing that it’s an “investment grade hyperscaler.”
In an interview with CNBC’s “Squawk on the Street,” CEO Wes Cummins said the five U.S. hyperscalers are Microsoft, Meta, Oracle, Amazon and Google, “so that’s really who we’re targeting.” He said the tenant for the first lease was CoreWeave.
“We started down this path a couple years ago and we stubbed our toe a few times, but I think we’ve really dialed in the process of the ability to build at scale,” Cummins said, adding that the company has a 4 gigawatt “active pipeline.”
In June, Applied Digital announced two long-term lease agreements with CoreWeave for 250 megawatts of capacity. The company said it expects $7 billion in rental revenue over 15 years, and the shares soared 48% on that news.
Applied Digital also secured $5 billion in infrastructure funding from Macquarie Asset Management earlier this month.
“We believe Polaris Forge 2 builds on that momentum, reflecting the strength of our partnerships and the speed at which we’re reshaping the AI infrastructure landscape,” Cummins said in Wednesday’s release.
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