Google expands its partnership with the Anthropic as looks to get ahead in the AI arms race.
Google is planning to invest $40bn into AI firm Anthropic as the AI arms race heats up.
An initial $10bn injection from Google will be followed at a later date by a further $30bn should the AI company reach a certain number of performance metrics, Bloomberg reported.
This is far from the first investment Google has made into Anthropic, having provided billions into the firm since its start-up days, including a five year deal to develop five gigawatts of data centre capacity in 2027 – a deal which is expected to be worth roughly $200bn.
Anthropic, which owns the large language model (LLM) Claude – a competitor Google’s Gemini, has positioned itself as a professional tool, used for optimising workflows and ‘deep research‘ with its Deepmind product.
However, this deal is likely to be focused on compute and AI infrastructure, encouraging Anthropic to rely on the search giant’s established infrastructure. This could help Google position itself as a competitor to Nvidia, bringing tensor processing units (TPUs) to the forefront of AI development, with two of the three major models now using Google’s specialised chips.
Although this deal is likely to be compute focused, it does still shine a spotlight onto the development of SEO and AEO (AI engine optimisation) or GEO (generative engine optimisation), and the competition between the two. Google’s overwhelming dominance in search has been wavering, as LLMs become more popular.
In theory, SEO does refer to the wider process of optimising content for search engines – however in practice this is almost exclusively a Google-specific task.
For affiliates, as LLMs becoming more sophisticated – AI overviews, AI chatbots, and even integrated checkouts – it has contributed to a plummeting click-through rate, ushering in a new ‘zero-click’ era.
