Alphabet reported its Q3 results yesterday. Google Cloud revenue more than doubled year over year. On the earnings call, Alphabet executives said TPU system sales, the AI servers Google builds around its Tensor Processing Unit chips, helped drive that growth.
Anthropic has agreed to buy TPU capacity from Google through 2033. Google has also agreed to provide Anthropic with more funding through 2030. That makes Alphabet both Anthropic’s supplier and one of its funders.
Investors reading Alphabet’s earnings release won’t find the commitments Alphabet has made to the customers buying its TPU systems. I traced those commitments through a year of Alphabet’s and Anthropic’s disclosures. Below, you’ll see the size of each commitment and the condition that ties Alphabet’s funding to Anthropic’s spending on computing capacity. You’ll also see how fast Alphabet’s exposure has grown compared with Google Cloud’s backlog. The article ends with a checklist for the next AI chip seller that reports results, so you can tell whether it’s financing the customers buying its chips.