Anthropic Commits $200B to Google Cloud Over 5 Years — Alphabet +2% After Hours

Anthropic alone accounts for over 40% of Google Cloud's disclosed backlog — and the company's server bill this year is already $20B

Alphabet (GOOGL) rose 2% in after-hours trading on May 5, immediately after The Information reported that Anthropic had committed to spending roughly $200 billion at Google Cloud over the next five years.

The contract starts in 2027. And one number stands out: more than 40% of Google's recently disclosed cloud backlog is the single Anthropic contract.

Google Promised Anthropic 5 GW

Behind this deal sits Google's commitment to provide Anthropic with 5 gigawatts of server capacity. Google supplies the compute infrastructure Anthropic needs to run and scale Claude. From Anthropic's side, instead of building its own infrastructure, it sources the required compute through Google Cloud.

Anthropic is already expected to spend $20 billion on server leasing this year — three times last year. The Information's projection came in December, and given Anthropic's revenue surge in Q1, the actual figure may be higher.

The Cloud Industry Now Depends on Two Companies

There's a bigger picture inside this report. AI cloud demand is, in practice, concentrating in just two companies: Anthropic and OpenAI.

OpenAI is expected to spend about $45 billion on servers this year, up sharply from roughly $17 billion a year ago. A significant portion of that flows to Microsoft, which has invested over $13 billion in OpenAI, and OpenAI uses Azure infrastructure at scale. For Anthropic, Amazon is the largest investor with AWS as the main partner, and Google is also a strategic partner with a 14% stake.

That's the reason Google, Amazon, and Microsoft poured tens of billions into AI companies in the first place. The investment dollars come back as cloud-server lease revenue. Each gets back what it put in — or more — in a closed loop.

What This Deal Means for Alphabet

Alphabet's Google Cloud trails AWS and Azure on share. But landing Anthropic — one of the world's top-tier AI companies — as a customer means more than the line-item revenue.

Anthropic running Claude on Google Cloud serves as the strongest possible reference: it proves Google's AI infrastructure can support a frontier AI model. That's the most powerful case study available for winning other enterprise customers.

Google Cloud Q1 revenue came in at $12.56 billion, up 28% YoY. A meaningful share of that growth is being driven by AI workload demand.