We learned earlier this month that Google and Anthropic had signed a deal that would grant the creator of the Claude AI models access to cloud servers and chips. Today, The information reported that Anthropic had agreed to pay a whopping $200 billion to Google over the next five years.
Contracts like this, or another recent Anthropic deal with Amazon worth billions of dollars, now represent a ridiculous amount of money promised to some of the biggest tech companies in the world. The information claims that deals with Anthropic and OpenAI are responsible for a $2 trillion revenue backlog at Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Oracle. These cloud service providers were early investors in the AI boom, betting that startups’ need for resources as they grew would pay lucrative dividends. So far, they have been right. Previous projections estimated that server costs in 2026 could reach $45 billion for OpenAI and $20 billion for Anthropic.
Similar moves have also taken place at chipmakers like NVIDIA, which has made its own investments in OpenAI. These costly circular deals are part of the driving force behind the current AI boom, but they’re not exactly a sustainable business practice. Data centers are putting a strain on limited resources, and RAM shortages are expected to continue to drive up prices and decrease sales of related gadgets in the near future.