Alphabet's bet on the AI startup Anthropic has now grown into a huge mountain. Documents disclosed on Thursday show that as of June 30, Alphabet's investments in a number of unnamed private companies totaled approximately $124.3 billion, and this value is almost entirely driven by its stake in Anthropic — the portion belonging to Anthropic has soared to about $124 billion, becoming one of Alphabet's most successful investments in history.

Behind these numbers are complex capital and computing power ties between two major AI giants. As the most promising challenger to OpenAI, Anthropic's Claude series has been catching up, while Alphabet is both its investor and cloud computing power provider. The seeds planted back then have grown rapidly in this wave of generative AI, and now just the paper wealth has approached $124 billion — Google's parent company has written a footnote on the return of this AI arms race with its own books.