Anthropic expands its use of one million Google TPUs, aiming to reach 1GW of computing power next year

Anthropic plans to expand the use of Google Cloud technology, including expanding the use of TPU (Tensor Processing Unit), an accelerator specially designed for AI, to 1 million units to increase computing resources and continue to promote AI research and product development. Anthropic says the expansion is worth tens of billions of dollars and is expected to bring more than 1GW of electricity-scale computing power by 2026.

Anthropic’s computing strategy focuses on diversified architectures. In addition to Google’s TPU, there are also AWS (Amazon Web Services, Amazon cloud computing service) Trainium and NVIDIA’s GPU. Anthropic makes flexible use of three major chip platforms.

The industry estimates that a 1GW power-scale data center costs approximately US$50 billion, of which approximately US$35 billion is spent on computing chips. Compared with its competitor OpenAI Stargate (Stargate), which aims to build 10GW of power-scale computing power, Anthropic is also catching up to ensure the continuous improvement of Claude model capabilities while maintaining cooperative relationships with industry parties.

It is worth noting that Amazon is Anthropic’s main training partner and cloud provider. The two parties continue to develop Project Rainier, a very large computing cluster with hundreds of thousands of AI chips across multiple data centers in the United States. Anthropic emphasizes that it remains committed to its partnership with Amazon.

Anthropic has provided services to more than 300,000 enterprise customers, among which the number of "large accounts" (meaning customers with annual revenue contribution of more than US$100,000) has grown nearly 7 times in the past year. This expansion helps Anthropic meet rapidly increasing customer demand. More powerful computing resources will support more rigorous testing, model alignment research, and large-scale, responsible resource deployment.

"Anthropic has a long-term partnership with Google, and this latest expansion helps us continue to grow and provide the computing power needed to advance advanced AI." Anthropic Chief Financial Officer Krishna Rao said, "From the Fortune 500 to AI startups, our customers rely on Claude to complete their most critical work, and this expanded computing power ensures that we can keep our models at the forefront of the industry as demand grows exponentially."

"Anthropic's choice to significantly expand TPU usage reflects the superior performance and cost-effectiveness our team has seen with TPUs over the years." Thomas Kurian, CEO of Google Cloud, stated, "We will continue to innovate to improve the efficiency and capacity of TPUs and further expand our mature AI accelerator product portfolio, including seventh-generation Ironwood TPUs."

Anthropic and Google Cloud initially announced their partnership in 2023. Anthropic uses Google Cloud’s AI infrastructure to train models and provides models and technology to enterprises through Google Cloud’s Vertex AI platform and Google Cloud Marketplace. Nowadays, with the surge in computing power demand, AI accelerators including Ironwood TPU are being expanded.