san francisco — Artificial intelligence company Anthropic has signed a multibillion-dollar deal with Google to acquire more computing power needed for the startup’s chatbot, Cloud.
Anthropic said Thursday that the deal would give it access to up to 1 million Google AI computer chips, worth “tens of billions of dollars, and is expected to bring more than a gigawatt of online capacity in 2026.”
A gigawatt, when used to refer to a power plant, is enough to power nearly 350,000 homes, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.
Google calls its AI chips Tensor Processing Units, or TPUs. Anthropic’s AI systems also run on chips from Nvidia and Amazon’s cloud computing division, The first major investor in Anthropic and its primary cloud provider.
Privately held Anthropic, which was founded by former OpenAI leaders in 2021, was valued last month at $183 billion after raising another $13 billion in investments. Its AI assistant Cloud competes with OpenAI’s ChatGPT and others in attracting business customers who use it to help with programming and other tasks.