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Apr 27, 2026
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Welcome back! Google will invest up to $40 billion in Anthropic and supply five gigawatts of compute. China blocks Meta's acqusition of AI agent Manus. Nvidia's market value surpasses $5 trillion.
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Google has agreed to make an additional investment in Anthropic of up to $40 billion, deepening a multi-pronged relationship that also includes a major expansion of Anthropic’s access to AI servers. The search engine company, an early backer of Anthropic, will initially invest $10 billion in at a $350 billion valuation, according to a source close to Google and another source close to Anthropic. That’s the same valuation at which Anthropic raised money from investors in February. Google will invest the remaining $30 billion once Anthropic reaches certain unspecified performance targets, the people said. Google will also supply five gigawatts of compute to Anthropic starting next year, adding to a string of recent deals to boost the startup’s access to servers to run and train its models. Such arrangements could
counter doubts from some observers, including rival OpenAI, that Anthropic had secured enough servers to keep up with its recent fast growth. Earlier this week, Anthropic said it had secured five gigawatts worth of computing power from Amazon to come online by the end of this year. Amazon also agreed to invest $25 billion in Anthropic. Bloomberg first reported on the Google deal.
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Chinese regulators on Monday blocked Meta Platform’s $2 billion acquisition of Manus and ordered the companies to terminate the deal. The Office of the Working Mechanism for Foreign Investment Security Review, an agency under the powerful National Development and Reform Commission, said it has made a decision to prohibit “foreign acquisition of the Manus project” “in accordance with laws and regulations,” without naming Meta nor giving specific reasons. “The Office requires the parties involved to terminate and revoke the acquisition transaction,” the regulator said in a statement on its website. In December, Meta announced a deal to acquire the company behind the popular AI agent Manus. Developed by Butterfly Effect, a company initially founded in Wuhan and Beijing, Manus went viral in March last year,
and the company subsequently raised $75 million from Benchmark. After receiving funding from one of Silicon Valley’s blue-chip venture firms, the company moved its headquarters and core engineering teams to Singapore and closed its China offices, in an attempt to water down its China image. The two companies didn’t disclose the price of the acquisition. The Wall Street Journal reported earlier that Meta would close the deal at more than $2 billion. Chinese regulators started investigating the transaction early this year, and the probe has sent some of the country’s startups scrambling, worrying about a popular exit route being blocked.
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Nvidia shares closed at an all time high of $208.27 on Friday, giving the company a market capitalization of $5.06 trillion, marking a new stage in the AI chip’s dominance. While Nvidia’s stock had closed at $207 in late October, it had mostly traded in a tight range between $170 and $190 since last summer. The latest rally reflects a new burst of optimism about the tech industry, likely reflecting growing signs that businesses are adopting AI technologies. As Nvidia is the dominant maker of AI-related chips, those signs are good news for the company.
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The supporters of the proposed California billionaire’s tax have enough signatures to get the proposal on the ballot in November, the Wall Street Journal reported Sunday. Under the proposed tax, billionaires would have to pay a one-time 5% tax on their net worth. The net worth would be based on billionaires’ voting interests in companies, which can be significantly more than their economic interest, creating the potential for the tax to be higher than expected. The tax has
prompted a number of Silicon Valley figures to move their primary residence out of California, including the Google cofounders Larry Page and Sergey Brin and Meta co founder Mark Zuckerberg. The Journal report on Sunday said more than 1.5 million people had signed a petition to get the proposal on the ballot.
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The federal judge overseeing Elon Musk’s lawsuit against OpenAI granted Musk’s request to dismiss his fraud claims against the ChatGPT maker. Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers’s ruling on Friday was in response to a proposal this month from Musk’s lawyers that the claims be dropped provided the court confirmed that it would proceed with Musk’s remaining claims of breach of charitable trust and unjust enrichment. Judge Gonzalez Rogers affirmed that the breach of charitable trust and unjust enrichment claims are going to trial, and therefore dismissed the fraud claims as
Musk’s lawyers requested. Dismissing his fraud claims supports Musk’s legal position that he is not seeking money from OpenAI. The remedies for fraud would typically involve awarding money to Musk personally, but Musk has stated that he does not want to receive money from OpenAI as a result of the lawsuit. Instead, he is asking the OpenAI for-profit to transfer over $100 billion to its charitable non-profit arm. The trial begins with jury selection on Monday.
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