Anthropic, valued at $965 billion（約150兆円）, is leasing over 1 gigawatt of U.S. data centers and has asked Google—its direct competitor—to guarantee the payments.

What happened: Anthropic has signed more than a dozen preliminary agreements to lease U.S. data centers with combined capacity above 1 gigawatt. The company is reportedly seeking a financial guarantee from Google to backstop those lease payments, with Apollo Global Management and Blackstone providing private credit as part of the financing structure.

Why it matters: Anthropic's most recent funding round closed in late May at a $965 billion（約150兆円） valuation and the company confidentially filed for a U.S. IPO earlier this month. Owning its own data centers would reduce dependence on the same cloud providers it competes with directly, giving the company more control over costs and performance as it scales. The arrangement underscores how deeply entangled these competitors have become—Google has committed up to $40 billion（約6.4兆円） to Anthropic despite Gemini competing directly with Claude.

What to watch: Anthropic's IPO filing and the outcome of the reported lease guarantee arrangement. The deal would represent an unusual level of financial interdependence between two direct competitors in enterprise AI.