Anthropic, freshly valued at $965 billion, is asking rival Google to financially guarantee its US data center lease payments as it builds out compute ahead of a public listing.
Key Points:
- Anthropic has signed more than a dozen preliminary leases for US data centers topping 1 gigawatt of capacity.
- Executives reportedly want Google to backstop those payments, with Apollo and Blackstone supplying the private credit.
- The talks surfaced days after Anthropic filed confidentially for an IPO at a $965 billion valuation.
Anthropic's Data Center Leases
Anthropic has signed more than a dozen preliminary agreements to lease US data centers with combined capacity above 1 gigawatt, Reuters reported Thursday.
Company executives have also discussed an arrangement in which Google would stand behind those lease payments if Anthropic could not meet them.
Apollo Global Management and Blackstone would supply private credit through a special-purpose vehicle that anchors the broader financing structure.
The AI firm has historically leaned on cloud providers, including Google Cloud, for most of its computing power, even as annualized revenue raced past $30 billion this spring. Leasing and running its own sites would hand it tighter control over costs and performance, while cutting its dependence on the same companies it competes with directly for customers.
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Google Rivalry And Funding
Google's Gemini competes head to head with Anthropic's Claude across AI assistants, coding tools and enterprise software. Even so, Google has committed up to $40 billion to the company and co-designs some of the chips it expects to run in the new facilities. The reported rent guarantee would push that already unusual entanglement a step further.
Last week, Apollo and Blackstone closed a $35 billion private credit package to fund Anthropic's lease of Google chips across five US data centers, with Broadcom adding residual-value guarantees. Neither Google nor Anthropic addressed the specifics, with Google declining to comment on rumors or speculation.
AI's Mutual Dependence
Google's interest in Anthropic's success runs well past the returns on its equity stake. A strong Anthropic keeps OpenAI from cornering the enterprise market and validates Google's own infrastructure bets. The two rivals now sit on opposite sides of several deals at once.
Anthropic filed confidentially for a US IPO this month, days after raising $65 billion in late May at a $965 billion valuation that edged past longtime rival OpenAI for the first time. It separately pays SpaceX $1.25 billion a month for compute, even though SpaceX backs the rival xAI, leaving two more AI giants bankrolling each other on the way to Wall Street this year.
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