Anthropic’s AI Spending Surges as Microsoft Rethinks Copilot

SPEAKER_1 (0:02)

Bloomberg Audio Studios, podcasts, radio, news. Bloomberg Tech is live from the heart of Silicon Valley with Ed Ludlow in San Francisco.

Tim Stenovec (0:23)

Coming up, Anthropic signs an $11.6 billion seven-year contract with Akamai for computing power. The largest deal in Akamai's history. Plus, President Trump calls on his meeting with Xi Jinping, quote, very productive. We'll discuss if there's anything to show for it. And Microsoft steps back from the race to build a personal chatbot and merging the consumer and workplace versions of its Copilot AI Assistant into one.

I'm Tim Stenovec, and for Ed Ludlow, it is Bloomberg Technology. First, though, a check on markets. Bloomberg's Nora Malinda joins us now for more. Hey, Nora.

Nora Malinda (0:59)

Hey, Tim. We are seeing a bounce back of major indexes from early session lows. Those session lows, of course, coming off of that consumer sentiment data that we got earlier this morning, showing that consumer sentiment fell to a four-month low. We've also got cooling oil really aiding sentiment here and a Nasdaq 100 that's actually heading for its biggest weekly gain in seven weeks. But one of the laggards that I want to look at right now, let's look at shares of Tesla currently pointing lower by about 1.7 percent. Now, this coming after the fact that the company's ramping up production of its Optimus Humanoid robot, but the concern here is about the production specifically as it pertains to the robot's arms. Now, we know that this robot is something specifically that the company plans to lease to other commercial clients, but not necessarily sell because they would like to have the opportunity to be able to actually revamp and refurbish some of these robots. And lastly, looking at shares of Metta. They are softer today, but the stock actually heading for its biggest monthly gain since 2013 here. And this all really, of course, coming from the optimism that we've been seeing on Wall Street about that Muse AI assistant.

Tim Stenovec (2:04)

All right, Nora Malinda, thank you. We'll be checking in with Nora throughout the hour here on Bloomberg Tech. Meantime, Anthropic locking up even more computing power to keep pace with demand for Claude. The AI startup has struck an $11.6 billion seven-year deal with Akamai. It comes, though, with an unusual twist, a warrant that could give Anthropic a stake in the company. Bloomberg's Seth Figerman joins us now with more. Hey, Seth, I was saying when this crossed yesterday, I'm thinking Akamai, CDN, Content Delivery Network, Netflix a dozen years ago.

Are they going all in on AI?

Seth Figerman (2:37)

Yeah. Well, it feels like at the moment, Anthropic and OpenAI and others are turning over every stone they can. Right now, we've got the chips and data centers and computer power they need to meet demands. So certainly for Akamai, you're right. I think they're taking a firm focus on their security and making their biggest bet yet to really claim a piece of the AI pie. But for Anthropic, these deals which can be unprecedented for Akamai are becoming routine. They're tapping Bitcoin miners and Neo Clouds, as well as rivals like Google and SpaceX to meet their demands.

Tim Stenovec (3:05)

So it's part of the demand story here, like going anywhere to look for this computer.

Seth Figerman (3:11)

Yeah. At one point, Anthropic said that their demand was growing 80x from the prior year.

All of a sudden, they had to plan for a rapid acceleration in computing capacity, far beyond what I think they had anticipated earlier this year. While you can do that by trying to launch these Stargate initiatives like OpenAI has done, I think you're seeing Anthropic move more in the direction of trying to get a lot of these bespoke partnerships off the ground and as quickly as they can.

Tim Stenovec (3:34)

On this idea of warrants, I think increasingly we're seeing this, not just from companies like Anthropic, but also companies like NVIDIA that are in this space. This idea that they can become owners or investors and other publicly traded companies. How do you look at this in terms of the cycle?

Seth Figerman (3:48)

Yeah, it certainly feels very much a piece of the circular financing ecosystem that we've all heard. You know, AMD did stock warrants as part of a larger computing deal with OpenAI, so it's certainly not unprecedented here. But I think it adds to that concern or anxiety that these suppliers and developers are taking stakes in one another, potentially inflating the demand and also raising questions about the financial viability of these deals.

Tim Stenovec (4:11)

So this demand isn't coming from everywhere. Let's take the news from Oracle yesterday, for example, in this idea of a force majeure on a data center in the Southwest. How can we look at what we heard from Anthropic and Akamai yesterday and also what we heard from Oracle?