Google To Spend $3.2B Building Data Center So Anthropic Can Afford To Keep Paying Google

NEW YORK—Google will reportedly fund a $3.2 billion data center to house chips for AI lab Anthropic, in a transaction industry observers described Thursday as either a landmark infrastructure partnership or the same money walking in a tight circle until everyone agrees it has grown.

Under the arrangement, Google provides the capital and the chips, Anthropic provides the demand and the eventual payments, and the payments are made possible by the capital, which returns to Google, which uses it to fund the data center, which generates the demand. At no point does the money exit the diagram.

"This is a deeply synergistic, mutually reinforcing flywheel," said a person familiar with the deal, drawing a circle in the air and then continuing to draw it for several minutes. "The beautiful part is that every participant is simultaneously the customer, the supplier, the investor, and the press release."

Economists noted the structure was indistinguishable from a company funding its own revenue, but cautioned that this observation was itself now a revenue stream, as several conferences had already booked panels to discuss it.

The two firms said the partnership would accelerate frontier AI development and create substantial value, declining to specify for whom, on the grounds that the question "assumed the value had to leave."

"We're not worried about the circularity," the person familiar with the deal said. "Circles are the only shape that doesn't fall down."