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Posted by elffjs 12 hours ago

Google plans to invest up to $40B in Anthropic(www.bloomberg.com)
383 points | 422 commentspage 3
dwayne_dibley 7 hours ago|
$40B. Numbers mean nothing anymore
wirgil1 3 hours ago||
tech is the biggest sector in the world. We're seeing what happens when those war chests for rainy days get brought out
0xBA5ED 6 hours ago|||
Yes, and it's incredibly wasteful.
pcurve 7 hours ago|||
Yup. You can actually buy several European airlines with that kind of money.

For example, you can buy KLM Air france for less than $3B.

It is a profitable business that does $30B in sales and $1B in profit. (and has been profitable since for the past 4-5 years)

Jabbles 5 hours ago|||
It has $40B in liabilities.

[PDF] https://www.airfranceklm.com/sites/default/files/2026-02/202...

nikcub 4 hours ago||||
Airlines are down there amongst cinema chains and video game retail stores in terms of being terrible businesses
polski-g 2 hours ago||
Want to know the easiest way to become a millionaire?

First, become a billionaire. Then, start an airline.

hayd 6 hours ago|||
"$30B in sales and $1B in profit."

This margin seems terrible.

oscarcp 5 hours ago||
4% seems reasonable, it's pretty much standard across the board in Europe (median sits around 6% if I recall correctly), not many companies can pull 10% profit. For example in Spain, major conglomerates like INDITEX have a 11%, Iberdrola has a 10%. We also don't use the same metrics and parameters as the US for profit, so the values are skewed.

That said, certain sectors like software (as in custom enterprise grade software dev) pull revenues that are much much higher sitting around 35%, but it's not that common.

mirekrusin 6 hours ago||
yep, you know what's better than billions? trillions.
6thbit 6 hours ago||
A 10B insurance policy on google’s business sounds like a bargain?

And with cashback through gcp usage!

Oras 8 hours ago||
They just announced their new chip, and they are the ones created transformers yet investing this amount in a competitor?

I don’t know what to make of it

pupppet 8 hours ago||
I wonder if Google regrets publishing that article on transformers.
jeffbee 7 hours ago||
Urs used to talk (internally) about not publishing "industry-enabling papers" which is why most Google infrastructure papers were describing something that had already been turned off, or was already in the process of being replaced by the next system (GFS, Vitess, etc). The things that did get published were either considered not key advantages, that other companies simply cannot do, things that other companies wouldn't bother doing, or experiments that never worked at all. There were exceptions of course. But it led to a public perception of the Google stack involving mostly technologies that were long dead or were never adopted.

"Attention Is All You Need" was a very very different thing and I also wonder if they are glad they published it. But I imagine if they hadn't, the motivation for researchers to leave Google would have been even larger.

cameronbrown 1 hour ago|||
> I also wonder if they are glad they published it

https://youtu.be/ue9MWfvMylE

Jeff Dean is asked this question by Geoffrey Hinton at 37:35 - might worth watching. Overall an interesting video.

sumedh 5 hours ago|||
So Google allowed publishing the Attention paper because they didn't understand its value.
CamperBob2 4 hours ago||
They patented it. When the dumb money stops sloshing around, we'll start to see the fallout from that.
northern-lights 6 hours ago|||
Why do you think Google considers Anthropic a competitor?
wirgil1 3 hours ago|||
hedge your bets, I know I would
jeffbee 8 hours ago|||
It makes every bit as much sense as investing in Snap while still operating their own social network product. Seems to have worked out fine (for Google, not Snap).
dzhiurgis 4 hours ago||
FWIW I’d buy SNAP now that they are at rock bottom
spwa4 8 hours ago||
Given that anthropic is probably paying it all back to them in compute bills, they may not be giving them anything.
cadamsdotcom 4 hours ago||
When they said we’d soon have a circular economy I didn’t know it’d be made up of investments in AI companies that will get fed right back into inference.
Cyclone_ 4 hours ago||
This feels weird to me. Why wouldn't Google want to go all in on Gemini? Unless they feel anthropic is pretty far ahead with claude?
wirgil1 3 hours ago|
If you can get influence at your competitor you take it. It's valuable for both of them regardless
whatever1 7 hours ago||
Cool. Will they use their balance sheets to pour all of this cash or are they going to bring the banking system to its knees and then we bail out everyone again ?
shimman 3 hours ago|
I don't see why not. The US is bailing out foreign countries, might as well bail out unsustainable businesses too.
namegulf 9 hours ago||
So $40B in google cloud credits in return for % in equity.

Didn't Amazon AWS do the same recently?

ChrisArchitect 7 hours ago|
Anthropic takes $5B from Amazon and pledges $100B in cloud spending in return

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47848276

sega_sai 5 hours ago||
In the last couple of weeks, seeing all the announcements of new models by OAI, Anthropic and Chinese companies I was thinking if Google has something up their sleeve, but this news suggests otherwise.
dubeye 7 hours ago||
Google seems to own a bit of everyone.
airstrike 7 hours ago|
you might even say they own the whole alphabet at this point
dzonga 7 hours ago|
my take is Anthropic needs a large cash infusion since it's the one of the popular model providers.

if it runs of out of cash - then it's bad for the whole industry.

same as OpenAI. so all players - will provide cash & compute to keep them going.

sdevonoes 7 hours ago||
> if it runs of out of cash - then it's bad for the whole industry.

Why? I don’t think we would suffer if anthropic disappeared tomorrow

ares623 7 hours ago|||
Google, Microsoft, Oracle, Meta, Nvidia. All their stock gains in the last 2 or so years were because of the AI hype. And who knows how much money the borrowed and promises they made on the assumption that their stock will continue to rise in the same pace for years to come. When one domino falls, they will follow. So they have every incentive to keep the music going for one of their "friends".
goolz 6 hours ago|||
If Anthropic disappeared tomorrow due to running out of cash it would cause a great panic, no?
shimman 3 hours ago||
For who? A bunch of financiers that gamble with pension funds? The real panic is when they IPO and force 401Ks to buy into it.
andxor 3 hours ago||
You're so naive. It's all a big game of domino.
slashdave 7 hours ago||
They need compute
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