alt Hacker NewsContext: a few weeks ago, Anthropic signed a deal to buy "multiple gigawatts of next-generation TPU capacity" from Google and Broadcom [1]. There have been several previous deals, too.
Some people call this sort of thing a "circular deal", but perhaps a better way to think of it is as a very large-scale version of vendor financing? The simple version of vendor financing is when a vendor gives a retailer time to pay for goods they purchased for resale. This is effectively a loan that's backed by the retailer's ability to resell the goods. There's a possibility that the retailer goes broke and doesn't pay, but the vendor has insight into how well the retailer is doing, so they know if they're a good risk.
Similarly, Google likely knows quite a lot about Anthropic because Anthropic buys computing services from Google for resale. They're making an equity investment rather than a loan, but the money will be coming back to Google, assuming Anthropic's sales continue to rise as fast as they have been.
Also, if you own Google stock, some small part of that is an investment in Anthropic?
[1] https://www.anthropic.com/news/google-broadcom-partnership-c...
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To be honest, I think "vendor financing" is still a very risky premise.
Vendors may be positioned to know how a customer is doing, but they're also incentivized to overestimate how well a customer is going to perform.
GE Capital (edit: and GMCA) is a great example of how seemingly reasonable vendor financing can cause the lender serious problems.
Google already knows Anthropic is a good investment. Google owns the chrome browser and they already know from traffic data how well Anthropic is doing. This is similar to how Mark Zuckerberg came to know Instagram is a good deal.
Reciprocal agreements aren't new, sometimes they're used to gain access to a market the other party already has established a foothold in for other industry segments. These companies operate in the same general industry: tech/internet so it could be complementary services they are each after.
So far both of these companies have shown they suck at support so we know that's not it. It could be that it might help Anthropic to leverage Gemini in their competition with OpenAI and Google will take compute commitments.
Anecdata: I'm finding a lot of my "type random question in URL/search bar" has decent top Gemini answers where I don't scroll to results unless I need to dive deeper.
In another context I might see it as vendor financing. However given that Google and Anthropic are competitors in this segment and given that Google has previously invested in them I'd rather see this as a sort of bartered stock purchase presumably for the purpose of hedging against failure. If Anthropic wins the race and it turns out to be winner takes all and you happen to own half of Anthropic then you still win half of the immediate spoils even though your internal team lost. If you view losing the race as an existential threat then having all your eggs in the one basket is a terrible proposition.
Good perspective.
Let's say Anthropic fails to pay it's debt, can Google take those TPU's back and make money from them?
IIRC Google already outright owns 15% of Anthropic.
It's pretty much vendor financing (although we could argue whether it should be classed as circular investment), with the extra trick being that both sides get to make number go up with it, through stock market valuations and the ability to borrow more money to set fire to so you can show how successful you are.
It could be legit, it could be a thickly veiled accounting fraud continuing the valuation inflation with fake deals that count money multiple times.
Maybe a little bit of both.
it's your time..
~ TK
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So yes, but that doesn't negate the circular investment aspect, for most intents and purposes.
The risk is from this structure is mostly to do with how this affects market cap. Companies using the value of their shares to fund demand for their services.
That's a risk.