Hi Dotikers!

Twenty-one billion dollars. That's how much Anthropic just put on the table for Google TPU chips via Broadcom, revealed during the chipmaker's quarterly results on December 11th. We've rarely seen such a clear statement of intent about the state of the race to artificial general intelligence.

Dario Amodei's startup, now valued at $350 billion, doesn't do things halfway. In October, it signed a massive partnership with Google Cloud for access to one million TPUs and over one gigawatt of compute capacity by 2026. This record order for Ironwood racks equipped with 7th generation TPUs makes that commitment concrete.

Our take? Anthropic is methodically building the infrastructure needed to deliver on its prediction of AGI by late 2026 or early 2027. More importantly, the startup is playing a remarkable game of chess: $21 billion with Google, $8 billion in Amazon investments through Project Rainier and its 500,000 Trainium chips, and now $15 billion from Microsoft and Nvidia with $30 billion in Azure compute attached. Anthropic isn't putting all its eggs in one basket. It's putting golden eggs in every basket.

The detail that fascinates us: Broadcom, the historical manufacturing partner for TPUs, is now selling directly to Anthropic. Google is accepting that its homegrown chips leave the Google Cloud walled garden. That's an admission that the compute war won't be won by keeping your toys to yourself.

For Nvidia, this is a wake-up call. SemiAnalysis analysts estimate that the TPU v7 now rivals the Blackwell chips. If the world's best models run on alternative silicon, Jensen Huang's monopoly suddenly looks less unassailable.

The real question is no longer who has the best models. It's who will have enough silicon to train them.

M.