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

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

#701

Post by pmdr » Sat, Apr 25, 2026, 2:31 PM UTC

hu3 wrote: post #182

urba_ wrote: post #28

I consider them competitors… This reminds me of Microsoft in 1997 investing $150 million in Apple, saving it from near bankruptcy

> Microsoft in 1997 investing $150 million in Apple, saving it from near bankruptcy. If only Apple could pass the favor forward. But no, they can't be bothered to invest even a single million in Asashi Linux to benefit their own hardware.

Well, the way Apple sees it, their hardware ships with a perfectly good OS. And they know their hardware has so far been so good that even if they ruin said OS, they'd still make money. What we (and Apple, as competition) need is a serious macbook-killer with full Linux support.

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

#702

Post by bitmasher9 » Sat, Apr 25, 2026, 2:32 PM UTC

SlinkyOnStairs wrote: post #648

fallat wrote: post #633

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We pretty much already had the layoffs, at least that's my perception. The next level of layoffs is probably still 25 years out.

There's layoffs, certainly. But all the economic indicators suggest those are "bad economy" layoffs dressed up as "AI" layoffs to keep the shareholders happy.

The real “AI layoffs” are all the people that are PIPed because their colleagues are better at leveraging AI.

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

#703

Post by asah » Sat, Apr 25, 2026, 2:37 PM UTC

skybrian wrote: post #276

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 f…

$40B is barely more than one quarter of google's net profit.

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

#704

Post by djaro » Sat, Apr 25, 2026, 2:48 PM UTC

simianwords wrote: post #548

omrajguru wrote: post #516

Google investing in its own customer, Anthropic buying Google's compute. the money doesn't really leave the room.

This sounds like a conspiracy theory if you don’t know how basic finance and economics work

Yup. Even if Anthropic spends that $40B back at Google and thus the money ends up there, Google is still out of $40B worth of compute or whatever the profit margin is on that.

It's why eating at your own restaurant is cheaper, but still not free.

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

#705

Post by bluGill » Sat, Apr 25, 2026, 2:48 PM UTC

kibwen wrote: post #682

gjsman-1000 wrote: post #669

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But does it matter? If you write a program in Python or JavaScript, you have a terrible mental model for how that code is actually executed in machine code. It's irrelevant though, you figure it out only when it's a problem. Even if you don't have a great mental model, now you have AI to identify the problems and generate an explanation of the structure for you.

> It's irrelevant though, you figure it out only when it's a problem. For the past decade people have been clawing their eyes out over how sluggish their computers have become due to everything becoming a bloated Electron app. It's extremely relevant. Meanwhile, here you are seemingly trying to suggest that not only should everything be a bloated, inefficient mess, it should also be buggy and inscrutable, even moreso…

That is the doom side. However AI has found and fixed a lot of security issues. I have personally used AI to improve my code speed, AI can analyze complex algorithms and figure out how to make them much faster in ways I can do as a developer, but it's a lot of work that I typically wouldn't do. Even just writing various targeted benchmarks to see where the problems really are in my code is something I can do, but would be so tedious I often would not bother. I can tell AI to do it and it will write those.

Only time will tell which version of the future we end up with. It could be good or bad and we will have to see.

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

#706

Post by bluGill » Sat, Apr 25, 2026, 2:49 PM UTC

dvfjsdhgfv wrote: post #605

robjeiter wrote: post #556

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like the whole market at this point is just AI since big tech other than Apple are all massively invested into that. Everyone owns either the S&P or the total world ETF which are both heavily skewed towards big tech and this trade - so literally everybody is in it. It might go well for a few more quarters/years but once something breaks or gets exponentially cheaper this will take down the whole market with it…

> literally everybody I personally make sure I really diversify, so that when I buy funds, I buy those with stocks of EU companies which pay dividends. AFAICT there are 0 European AI companies that pay dividends.

For tax reasons most companies are avoiding paying dividends. It still happens but it's not nearly as common and companies are trying to get away from it because for many investors it is better not to have dividends paid.

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

#707

Post by djaro » Sat, Apr 25, 2026, 2:52 PM UTC

skizm wrote: post #282

Weren't there reports of Anthropic's stock trading on secondary markets at $1T valuation recently? Now Google invests at a $350B valuation. I get valuations are often times just smoke and mirrors, but this seems like a pretty big disconnect. What's going on there?

It's valued at $1T by people who do not have $1T.

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

#708

Post by joshribakoff » Sat, Apr 25, 2026, 2:52 PM UTC

annexrichmond wrote: post #690

luke727 wrote: post #666

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Yes, the planet got destroyed. But for a beautiful moment in time we created a lot of value for shareholders."

Well, historically this has been more effective than any other system known to man.

Effective at what?

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

#709

Post by jspaetzel » Sat, Apr 25, 2026, 2:58 PM UTC

joshribakoff wrote: post #708

annexrichmond wrote: post #690

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, historically this has been more effective than any other system known to man.

Effective at what?

Increasing shareholder value

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

#710

Post by bluGill » Sat, Apr 25, 2026, 2:59 PM UTC

stasomatic wrote: post #327

barnabee wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where I work: - Development velocity is very noticeably much higher across the board. Quality is not obviously worse, but it's LLM assisted, not vibe coding (except for experiments and internal tools). - Things that would have been tactically built with TypeScript are now Rust apps. - Things that would have been small Python scripts are full web apps and dashboards. - Vibe coding (with Claude Desktop, nobody is using…

I am hobbyist playing around. Recently dropped CC (which gave me a sense of awe 2 months ago), but they realized GPUs need CapEx and I want to screw around with pi.dev on a budget. Then on to GH Copilot but couldn't understand their cost structure, ran out of quota half month in, now on Codex. I don't really see any difference for little stuff. I also have Antigravity through a personal Gmail account with access to O…

Developers being let go is about the economy. Every time we see a slowdown people are let go and we always blame the fad but it's the economy not whatever.