Google mulls deeper Anthropic investment as it scales global data infrastructure

Google is holding preliminary talks about putting more money into Anthropic, Business Insider reported Wednesday. People familiar with the matter say the new financing round could value Anthropic at over $350 billion.

This isn’t Google’s first rodeo with the AI startup. The company has already put roughly $3 billion into Anthropic through two separate deals. First came a $2 billion pledge in 2023, then another $1 billion earlier this year.

Last month, the two companies locked in a major cloud computing deal. Anthropic gets access to one million Tensor Processing Units and one gigawatt of computing power by 2026. Building one gigawatt of AI data center capacity runs about $50 billion, with $35 billion of that just for chips, according to industry estimates.

As reported by Cryptopolitan this computing deal is central to Anthropic’s plans. Unlike OpenAI’s flashy 33-gigawatt Stargate vision, this one is built for actual execution, say industry watchers.

Remote island selected for strategic data hub

In a separate move, Google plans to build a large AI data center on Christmas Island, a tiny Australian territory in the Indian Ocean. The company signed a cloud deal with Australia’s Department of Defense earlier this year, Reuters reports based on reviewed documents and official interviews.

Nobody’s talked publicly about the Christmas Island data center until now. Many details remain secret, how big it’ll be, what it’ll cost, exactly how it’ll be used. The island sits 350 kilometers south of Indonesia. Military experts say a facility there would be valuable for monitoring Chinese submarine and naval activity in the Indian Ocean.

Google is deep into talks to lease land near the island’s airport for the data hub, Christmas Island Shire officials told Reuters. Council meeting records show the company is also working on a deal with a local mining company to secure energy needs.

A recent war game involving Australian, U.S., and Japanese forces showed Christmas Island’s role as a forward defense line for Australia in regional conflicts. The exercises highlighted advantages for launching unmanned weapon systems from there.

Bryan Clark ran those war games. He used to be a U.S. Navy strategist and now works at the Hudson Institute. Clark says having a forward command and control node on Christmas Island would be critical in a crisis with China or another adversary.

AI powers future combat systems

“The data centre is partly to allow you to do the kinds of AI-enabled command and control that you need to do in the future, especially if you rely on uncrewed systems for surveillance missions and targeting missions and even engagements,” Clark told Reuters.

Subsea cables give you more bandwidth than satellites, he explains, and they’re more reliable. China would likely jam satellite communications or Starlink in a crisis.

“If you’ve got a data centre on Christmas, you can do a lot of that through cloud infrastructure,” he added.

Australia’s defense department entered a three-year cloud agreement with Google in July. Britain’s military recently announced a similar Google cloud deal, which officials say will boost intelligence sharing with the United States.

Last month Google applied for Australian environmental approvals to build the first subsea cable connecting Christmas Island to Darwin, a northern Australian city where U.S. Marine Corps are based for six months each year.

SubCom, a U.S. company, will install the cable link to Darwin, documents show. Reuters has reported SubCom is the exclusive undersea cable contractor to the U.S. military. The company previously connected the U.S./UK military base of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean to a cable stretching from Australia to Oman.