An increasingly wide-open land rush for artificial intelligence (AI) just got more expensive and interesting.
Google is pumping more than $1 billion in Anthropic, the Financial Times reported today. The search-engine behemoth, which already has committed $2 billion to Anthropic, joins a conga line of investors. Last year, Amazon.com Inc. doubled its stake in OpenAI’s chief rival to $8 billion. Yet another cash infusion, a $2 billion round led by Lightspeed Venture Partners in January, gave Anthropic a $60 billion valuation.
Meanwhile, Microsoft Corp. disclosed in a blog post yesterday that it is losing its designation as exclusive provider of computing capacity for OpenAI, in which it has invested at least $13 billion. The change in status was revealed as part of President Donald Trump’s unveiling of Stargate Project, a joint venture of OpenAI, Oracle Corp., and Softbank to plow billions of dollars into AI infrastructure in the U.S.
Oracle is a “key initial technology partner,” along with Microsoft, Arm and NVIDIA Corp., in setting up data center infrastructures, OpenAI said in a blog post outlining Stargate.
At the same time, conversational search engine Perplexity AI on Tuesday launched an API service, Sonar, that lets enterprises and developers build the startup’s search tools into their own applications.
Taken together, the moves highlight a progressively frenetic AI market that only seems to be getting more heated following Trump’s inauguration Monday, where he was flanked by top executives from Google, Apple Inc., Amazon.com Inc., and Meta Platforms Inc.
Since he took office, Trump has revoked an executive order from former President Joe Biden that forced AI developers to safety-test their products, and announced the Stargate Project, a $500 billion investment over four years to build AI infrastructure across the U.S., creating thousands of new jobs in the process.
“The data centers are actually under construction,” Oracle Chairman Larry Ellison said at a news conference at the White House, alongside Trump. “The first of them are under construction in Texas. Each building is a half a million square feet. There are 10 buildings currently being built, but that will expand to 20 and other locations beyond the Abilene location, which is our first location.”
“All of us look forward to continuing to build and develop AI — and in particular AGI [artificial general intelligence] — for the benefit of all of humanity,” OpenAI said in a statement to Newsweek. “We believe that this new step is critical on the path, and will enable creative people to figure out how to use AI to elevate humanity.”
The thirst for data center expansion to absorb the energy needs of AI presage what is largely expected to be the year of agentic AI for enterprises, according to industry experts.
“We believe this is the start of a wave of massive AI investments to take place in the U.S. as we expect more big tech players to make announcements over the coming weeks,” Wedbush Securities analyst Dan Ives said in a note Wednesday. “Stargate is really focused on data center buildouts in the U.S. (starting in Texas)….we ultimately believe another $1 trillion of U.S. AI investments could be committed by the rest of the Big Tech world as momentum builds in Silicon Valley.”
A majority of chief information officers and chief technology officers (53%) consider agentic AI essential to IT operations, while a whopping 88% say it is “core or peripheral,” according to a PagerDuty Inc.’s 2025 State of Digital Operations Report based on survey responses from more than 1,100 operations leaders worldwide.
