Google Spends Up to IDR 690 Trillion to Rival OpenAI, AI Competition Gets Brutal

JAKARTA - The global competition in the artificial intelligence industry is heating up. Technology giant Google is rumored to invest up to US$40 billion or around Rp690 trillion into Anthropic, a chatbot developer company Claude known as one of OpenAI's strongest rivals.

The deal consists of an initial injection of 10 billion US dollars, with an additional 30 billion US dollars if Anthropic manages to meet certain targets that have been agreed upon.

This move marks an increasingly aggressive scramble for dominance in the AI sector, not only in terms of artificial intelligence models, but also the computing infrastructure that is the backbone of its development.

Anthropic has been in the spotlight in recent months after insisting on refusing to use their AI model for autonomous weapons systems or mass surveillance in the United States. This attitude has triggered tensions with the US government.

Even the Pentagon had designated Anthropic as a supply chain risk, which could potentially hinder the use of the company's software by government agencies. Anthropic also took legal action to challenge the decision.

In the midst of the controversy, the company actually showed off its technological capabilities through their latest model, the Claude Mythos Preview.

This model is said to have successfully identified security gaps in a number of software - some of which have been hidden for decades. The ability is considered very strategic.

On the one hand, the technology can help the government strengthen its digital defense system. But on the other hand, if it falls into the wrong hands, it has the potential to become a dangerous cyber weapon for espionage activities.

Anthropic calls Mythos their strongest system so far, with advanced cyber security features. Due to its high sensitivity, access to the model is restricted to only a select number of partners. However, reports say the system is suspected to have leaked outside of official users.

Google's investment in Anthropic also shows a unique pattern in the AI industry: capital turnover that returns to investors through the purchase of chips, cloud capacity, and computing power. In other words, large funding often leads to the use of the investor's own infrastructure services.

In this sector, access to data centers and AI-specific chips is a determining factor. Companies are racing to secure large-scale computing capacity to train and run advanced models.

Competitors such as OpenAI are also continuing to strengthen their infrastructure through various partnerships, including with chip manufacturers.

Meanwhile, Anthropic is not standing still. In addition to Google's support, the company previously collaborated with CoreWeave to increase data center capacity.

Anthropic also received an additional 5 billion US dollars from Amazon as part of an agreement that could potentially grow to US$100 billion in the form of computing resources. Despite competing in the development of AI models, Google remains an important infrastructure partner for Anthropic.

The startup relies heavily on Google Cloud, in particular for its tensor processing units (TPU), a special AI chip that is an alternative to Nvidia's dominance.

Previous collaborations between Anthropic, Google, and Broadcom have even locked in TPU-based computing capacity at gigawatt scale starting in 2027.

Through this latest investment, Google is expected to add another 5 gigawatt of computing power in the next five years. The figure shows how expensive it is to stay relevant at the forefront of AI.

The competition is now not just about who has the smartest model, but who is able to build the largest computing foundation.

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