Anthropic inks multibillion-dollar deal with Google for AI chips

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SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Artificial intelligence company Anthropic has signed a multibillion-dollar deal with Google to acquire more of the computing power needed for the startup's chatbot, Claude.

Anthropic said Thursday the deal will give it access to up to 1 million of Google's AI computer chips and is “worth tens of billions of dollars and is expected to bring well over a gigawatt of capacity online in 2026.”

A gigawatt, when used in reference to a power plant, is enough to power roughly 350,000 homes, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.

Google calls its specialized AI chips Tensor Processing Units, or TPUs. Anthropic's AI systems also run on chips from Nvidia and the cloud computing division of Amazon, Anthropic's first big investor and its primary cloud provider.

The privately held Anthropic, founded by ex-OpenAI leaders in 2021, last month put its value at $183 billion after raising another $13 billion in investments. Its AI assistant Claude competes with OpenAI's ChatGPT and others in appealing to business customers using it to assist with coding and other tasks.