Google plans to invest up to $40B in Anthropic • Hacker News Board

Re: Google plans to invest up to $40B in Anthropic

#271

Post by qingcharles » Fri, Apr 24, 2026, 11:03 PM UTC

msy wrote: post #185

Jagerbizzle wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm burning an insane number of tokens 8-12 hours a day for the dramatic improvement of some internal tooling at a big tech company. Using it heavily for an unannounced future project as well. I presume I'm not the only one.

We suddenly have a proliferation of new internal tools and resources, nearly all of which are barely functional and largely useless with no discernible impact on the overall business trajectory but sure do seem to help come promo time. Barely an hour goes by without a new 4-page document about something that that everyone is apparently ment to read, digest and respond to, despite its 'author' having done none of thos…

My main use of vibecoding is creating dozens of internal tools that have sped up tasks, or made tasks possible that were previously not. These tools would have taken weeks of time to build manually and would have been hard to justify, rather than just struggling with manual processes every now and again. AI has been life-changing in creating these kinda janky tools with janky UI that do everything they're supposed to perfectly, but are ugly as hell.

Re: Google plans to invest up to $40B in Anthropic

#272

Post by [deleted] » Fri, Apr 24, 2026, 11:05 PM UTC

senordevnyc wrote: post #125

iLoveOncall wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Run-rate revenue is not ARR. For all we know they could have a revenue of $100 and claim a run-rate revenue of $30B. Given the fact that both Altman and Amodei are pathological liars, there's absolutely no reason to believe that Anthropic has $30B ARR.

For all we know they could have a revenue of $100 and claim a run-rate revenue of $30B. Can you explain how that’d work? What would the $30B figure be based on if they only have $100 in revenue?

[deleted]

Re: Google plans to invest up to $40B in Anthropic

#273

Post by casey2 » Fri, Apr 24, 2026, 11:05 PM UTC

dpark wrote: post #240

er2d wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Im convinced none of these people have any training in corporate finance. For if they did they'd realise they were wasting money. I guess you gotta look busy. But the stick will come when the shareholders look at the income statement and ask... So I see an increase in operating expenses. Let me go calculate the ROIC. Hm its lower, what to do? Oh I know, lets fire the people who caused this (it wont be the C-Suite or…

Do you really think companies have started spending millions on tokens and no one from finance has been involved? You could argue that all the spending is wasted (doubtless some is), but insisting that the decision is being made in complete ignorance of financial concerns reeks of that “everyone’s dumb but me” energy.

More that there is a poor incentive structure. Just like how PE can make money by leveraged buyouts and running businesses into the ground. Many of the financial instruments that make both that and the current AI bubble possible were legal then made illegal within the lifetimes of the last 16 presidents.

Round-tripping used to be regulated. SPVs used to be regulated. If you need a loan you used to have to go to something called a bank, now it comes from ???? who knows drug cartels, child traffickers, blackstone, russians & chinese oligarchs. Even assuming it doesn't collapse tommorow why should they make double digit returns on AI datacenters built on the backs of Americans?

Re: Google plans to invest up to $40B in Anthropic

#274

Post by 2ndorderthought » Fri, Apr 24, 2026, 11:05 PM UTC

Jagerbizzle wrote: post #208

andriy_koval wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have some coworker who says something similar, he vibe coded tons of cryptic code, which indeed solves some problem though could be way more compact and well structured. Now it is hitting complexity limitation, since llm now cant comprehend it, and human cant comprehend it by large a margin.

honest recommendation: nuke and pave after analyzing (w/ AI of course) where it went horribly wrong. it's trivial to reimplement a better solution.

The problem was definitely because they didn't use enough AI fast enough. They should just try again

Re: Google plans to invest up to $40B in Anthropic

#275

Post by inquirerGeneral » Fri, Apr 24, 2026, 11:05 PM UTC

an0malous wrote: post #153

tiffanyh wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s what’s needed when you go from $9B in ARR … to $30B in ARR literally just one quarter later . That kind of insane growth & demand is unprecedented at that scale. https://www.anthropic.com/news/google-broadcom-partnership-c...

What is all this AI doing? People are spending 10’s to 100’s of billions and no service or technology seems better or cheaper. Everything is more expensive and worse.

[dead]

Re: Google plans to invest up to $40B in Anthropic

#276

Post by skybrian » Fri, Apr 24, 2026, 11:08 PM UTC

Context: a few weeks ago, Anthropic signed a deal to buy "multiple gigawatts of next-generation TPU capacity" from Google and Broadcom [1]. There have been several previous deals, too.

Some people call this sort of thing a "circular deal", but perhaps a better way to think of it is as a very large-scale version of vendor financing? The simple version of vendor financing is when a vendor gives a retailer time to pay for goods they purchased for resale. This is effectively a loan that's backed by the retailer's ability to resell the goods. There's a possibility that the retailer goes broke and doesn't pay, but the vendor has insight into how well the retailer is doing, so they know if they're a good risk.

Similarly, Google likely knows quite a lot about Anthropic because Anthropic buys computing services from Google for resale. They're making an equity investment rather than a loan, but the money will be coming back to Google, assuming Anthropic's sales continue to rise as fast as they have been.

Also, if you own Google stock, some small part of that is an investment in Anthropic?

[1] https://www.anthropic.com/news/google-broadcom-partnership-c...

Re: Google plans to invest up to $40B in Anthropic

#277

Post by flockonus » Fri, Apr 24, 2026, 11:10 PM UTC

htx80nerd wrote: post #258

zaphar wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google does have a sort of temporary moat. They have a much better hardware supply line story than anyone else and the revenue to maintain that edge indefinitely.

This is the thing - Google is a real company with well established business, money of their own, hardware, server farms, etc. ChatGPT and Anthropic have none of that in the same way google does. They have an incentive to lie and 'fake it till you make it' so they can get out of the 'risk zone' of collapsing back in on themselves. Google can throw money at Gemini all day.

That may be true for OpenAI, less so for Antropic - which has much better margins. Both of these companies CEOs have come in public saying the same.

No doubt as of currently Google has a better business. But the same argument could have been said about Instagram or Whatsapp before Facebook (now Meta) acquired them.

Re: Google plans to invest up to $40B in Anthropic

#278

Post by ManuelKiessling » Fri, Apr 24, 2026, 11:10 PM UTC

consumer451 wrote: post #104

It is very difficult for me to see any amount of money being thrown at Anthropic as a bad idea. The amount of new revenue that I am personally able to create for my clients, using Claude models for dev, and Claude models inside the insanely agile products delivered, is astounding. If I was not currently experiencing this myself, and someone told me that this was possible, I would be calling them names.

Would you mind sharing what you can and want about how the sausage is made? I would love to hear concrete cases where actual leverage is measurable. I‘m asking in good faith, not to attack your standpoint.

Re: Google plans to invest up to $40B in Anthropic

#279

Post by elAhmo » Fri, Apr 24, 2026, 11:14 PM UTC

33MHz-i486 wrote: post #55

I think the subtext of the last few weeks is the Anthropic was becoming severely capacity constrained (or approaching that). They seem to have had to sign two somewhat adverse contracts with Amazon and Google in short succession. suddenly model quality is back up again.

You really think that for companies of this size, signing a contract would immediately reflect in you as end user noticing improved model quality?

Re: Google plans to invest up to $40B in Anthropic

#280

Post by cmiles8 » Fri, Apr 24, 2026, 11:17 PM UTC

Regardless of if this is “vendor financing” or “circular financing” the history books are riddled with this sort of stuff ending very badly.

It’s concerning that the only thing that seems to be keeping the AI bubble inflated at this point is money from the folks selling things to AI companies. That’s very much not a good sign no matter how you spin it.

I’m a fan of AI and there’s clearly value to it… however that value seems completely out of whack with the money pumping into the ecosystem and at some point such irrational behaviors break.