Alphabet Inc. Class C (GOOG.US) throws a 40 billion lock on Anthropic: the duopoly of AI is taking shape, ending the era of the three families.

Alphabet Inc. Class C (GOOG.US) will invest up to $40 billion in Anthropic, further deepening the cooperation between the two companies. Both sides are partners and competitors in the field of artificial intelligence. On Friday, Anthropic stated that Alphabet Inc. Class C has committed to immediately invest $10 billion in cash at the latest valuation of $380 billion. Alphabet Inc. Class C will make an additional investment of $30 billion in Anthropic after reaching performance milestones, while also expanding Anthropic's computing power. Anthropic is an important customer of Alphabet Inc. Class C's chips and cloud services, while Alphabet Inc. Class C is expanding these businesses to compensate for the maturity of its core revenue source - search advertising. Alphabet Inc. Class C Cloud will provide Anthropic with 5 gigawatts of computing power over the next five years, starting in 2027, with the possibility of additional gigawatts in the future. This agreement is a further expansion of the cooperation agreement signed earlier this month between Anthropic, Alphabet Inc. Class C, and Broadcom Inc. Alphabet Inc. Class C's TPU is one of the most competitive alternatives to NVIDIA Corporation's chips in this industry with extremely high demand for computing power. For Anthropic and other AI developers, TPU is a scarce and valuable resource. The end of the oligopoly and the formation of the two strong adversaries The finalization of this investment signifies a fundamental restructuring of the competition in the AI industry. In the past two years, the top tier of the AI industry has been defined as the "oligopoly" - OpenAI, Alphabet Inc. Class C, and Anthropic. However, this narrative has now come to an end. Looking at Anthropic's financing list over the past six months, a thought-provoking reality emerges: Amazon.com, Inc.: $5 billion in cash, up to $25 billion, plus 5 gigawatts of Trainium computing power and a $100 billion AWS procurement contract; Alphabet Inc. Class C: $10 billion in cash, up to $40 billion, plus 5 gigawatts of TPU computing power; NVIDIA Corporation: up to $10 billion, 1 gigawatt of GPU supply; Microsoft Corporation: up to $5 billion, $30 billion in computing power purchases from Azure by Anthropic. All four top Silicon Valley players are now in Anthropic's list of shareholders. The cumulative computing power commitment exceeds 11 gigawatts - equivalent to the power output of 10 nuclear power plants. The rivalry has shifted from the "oligopoly" to a confrontation between the two strong forces of the Anthropic camp and OpenAI. The concept of the oligopoly is now obsolete. Core division: Big Model+ ASIC vs. Big Model+ GPU Behind this restructuring is a clearer technical division of paths. Anthropic is following the path of "Big Model+ ASIC". Alphabet Inc. Class C's TPU and Amazon.com, Inc.'s Trainium are specialized chips tailored for AI workloads (ASIC). The future computing power base of Anthropic will be mainly supported by these two ASIC systems. One of the reasons Alphabet Inc. Class C is willing to invest $40 billion in Anthropic is that Alphabet Inc. Class C's capital expenditure plan for this year is as high as $185 billion, with a significant amount of funds going towards data centers and TPU capacity. If the TPU does not have major customers to absorb, it becomes the most expensive inventory. Anthropic serves as both a gateway for enterprise customers and the best ballast for Alphabet Inc. Class C's TPU capacity. OpenAI, on the other hand, is following the path of "Big Model+ GPU". OpenAI's core computing power comes from the Stargate project closely linked to NVIDIA Corporation - a massive infrastructure project with a target scale of $500 billion, with the computing power base primarily consisting of NVIDIA Corporation GPUs. The advantage of this path lies in the maturity of the NVIDIA Corporation GPU ecosystem and comprehensive software stack. However, the downside is the long deployment period, with full production of Stargate expected to wait until around 2029, and the progress of the first Texas data center is still slow. The underlying logic of these two paths is starkly different. The ASIC path offers high energy efficiency, lower unit computing costs, but high customization and limited flexibility in the ecosystem. The GPU path offers strong generality, a wider developer ecosystem, but high power consumption and costs. The current competitive situation is to some extent a proxy war between the ASIC camp and the GPU camp: Alphabet Inc. Class C and Amazon.com, Inc. are leveraging Anthropic to validate and promote their ASIC chips, while NVIDIA Corporation is strengthening its dominant position in AI infrastructure through OpenAI and Stargate. Alphabet Inc. Class C's calculation: Better to invest than compete head-on Alphabet Inc. Class C is willing to invest $40 billion in its nominal competitors, and three numbers can explain this decision. Firstly, Anthropic's annualized revenue in March 2026 has surpassed $30 billion, compared to only around $1 billion at the beginning of 2025 - a thirty-fold increase in a year. Claude Code has gained popularity from the programmer community, the enterprise channels have fully opened up, and the B2B customers have expanded from startups to Fortune 500 companies. Secondly, Anthropic's implied valuation in the secondary market is close to $1 trillion and continues to dominate the market share of developers in the AI enterprise market over Gemini's similar products. Thirdly, Alphabet Inc. Class C has DeepMind, Gemini, and the world's largest TPU cluster in its hands, but Gemini has been overshadowed by Claude in the enterprise-level AI market since its launch over two years ago. By investing in Anthropic, Alphabet Inc. Class C has set up a hedge operation of "buying in if you can't afford to lose." If Anthropic wins the AI enterprise market, Alphabet Inc. Class C will at least have equity returns. If Gemini succeeds, Alphabet Inc. Class C will benefit from both ends. If Gemini fails and TPU shipments are steady, the AI business can also gain a foothold with Anthropic. The most awkward role: OpenAI While Anthropic's computing power issue has been resolved, the computing power problem is starting to be highlighted for OpenAI. Within four days, Anthropic has received two large injections of over $10 billion each from Amazon.com, Inc. and Alphabet Inc. Class C, securing commitments of over 11 gigawatts of computing power. OpenAI has been coordinating the Stargate project for almost a year, with frequent rumors of funding gaps, and the funding promised by SoftBank is still being disbursed in installments, while Microsoft Corporation is no longer the exclusive computing power supplier to OpenAI. The deeper issue is that OpenAI's traditional advantages are being eroded. While the GPT series still leads in single-point performance, Claude Code's market share in programming scenarios and Claude's market share in enterprise applications continue to expand. At the same time, Microsoft Corporation, OpenAI's core ally, has quietly appeared in Anthropic's list of investors - this is an extreme version of "hedging": supporting Azure, which also supplies computing power to Anthropic. If Anthropic has wrapped up the cloud giants (Amazon.com, Inc., Alphabet Inc. Class C), GPU giants (NVIDIA Corporation), and Microsoft Corporation as its four main supporters, then OpenAI needs to quickly find an equally strategic partner in sovereign capital and cloud giants - and do so quickly. Benchmark scores can no longer determine the outcome of the AI industry. The true playing field of this shuffle is the three-line game of cash, computing power, and ecosystems. When Alphabet Inc. Class C invested $40 billion, the outcome of the first round had already been decided. Source: Wall Street Watch, Author: He Jie, GMTEight Editor: Chen Qiuda