# AI Compute Shifts and Strategic Cloud Investments

**Podcast:** TechCrunch Daily Crunch
**Published:** 2026-04-25

## Transcript

This is TechCrunch.
Google plans to invest up to 40 billion dollars in Anthropik.
I'm Imran Sheik and your Weekend Crunch featuring three Big Tech Headlines starts right now.
Bob Iger is returning to Thrive Capital as an advisor just one month after stepping down as CEO of Disney, a role he led for nearly two decades.
Iger previously served a two-month stint as a venture partner at the firm in late 2022, but left when the Disney board asked him to retake the helm of the media conglomerate following his initial departure from the company in 2020.
Iger, who already owns a stake in the firm, will work with Thrive's investment staff and portfolio founders, the Wall Street Journal reported.
However, his advisory role will likely not require a full-time commitment.
Thrive manages over $50 billion in assets, according to PitchBook.
In February, the firm announced that it raised $10 billion in capital commitments for its 10th fund, the largest in the firm's 17-year history.
Thrive holds significant stakes in OpenAI, Stripe, and SpaceX.
The firm also amassed a 7% ownership stake in Cursor, whose potential sales to SpaceX could be worth about $4.2 billion, Bloomberg reported.
Amazon just scored a major coup with Meta, thanks, once again, to Amazon's own homegrown chips.
Meta has signed a deal to use millions of AWS Graviton chips to power its growing AI needs, Amazon announced on Friday.
Take note, though, because the AWS Graviton is an ARM-based CPU, a central processing unit, the chip that handles general computing tasks, not a GPU, a graphical processing unit.
You see, while GPUs remain the chip of choice for training large models, once those models are trained, AI agents built on top of them are causing a shift in the type of chip needed.
Agents create compute-intensive workloads like real-time reasoning, writing code, search, and the coordination involved in managing agents through multi-step tasks.
AWS's latest version of Graviton was designed specifically to handle AI-related compute needs, the company says.
This deal brings more of Meta's cash back to AWS instead of competitors like Google Cloud.
Last August, Meta signed a six-year, $10 billion deal with Google Cloud, though Meta had, until then, primarily been an AWS customer that also used Microsoft Azure.
Now, we couldn't help but notice that AWS timed the announcement of this deal right as the Google Cloud Next conference wrapped up, like a virtual smirk at its cloud rival.
Ultimately, the Meta deal is allowing Amazon to showcase a huge AI customer as a proving point for its homegrown CPUs.
Google plans to invest up to $40 billion in Anthropic and support the AI firm's growing computing needs, Bloomberg reports.
The Alphabet subsidiary is committing to invest $10 billion now at a $350 billion valuation for Anthropic, with another $30 billion to follow if Anthropic hits certain performance targets, according to Anthropic.
The promise of investment comes after Anthropic released its latest model, Mythos, to a limited group of partners this month.
Anthropic says that Mythos is the company's most powerful model to date and has significant cybersecurity applications.
Due to potential misuse, Anthropic has restricted broader access, while it works with select organizations to evaluate and address those risks, though the model has already fallen into unsanctioned hands.
It's also likely expensive to run at scale.
The AI race is increasingly defined by access to the compute needed to train and deploy these systems.
OpenAI has moved aggressively to secure that capacity through a web of multi-hundred-billion-dollar deals across cloud providers, chip suppliers, and energy, including an expanded deal with chipmaker Cerebrus this month.
Anthropic's relationship with Google predates this week's news.
Earlier this month, Anthropic announced a partnership with Google and chipmaker Broadcom, which designs custom AI chips for Google to access multiple gigawatts of TPU-based computing capacity beginning in 2027.
And folks, that's your Daily Crunch.
Today's stories were reported by Rebecca Belan, Marina Temkin, Julie Bord, and more awesome TechCrunch journalists.
Have a great weekend, folks.
We'll see you here on Tuesday, and until then, find us at TechCrunch.com.
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