Alphabet Inc.’s Google just cut one of the largest checks in tech history. Up to $40 billion for Anthropic. $10 billion flows in now, at a $350 billion valuation. The rest—$30 billion—hinges on performance milestones. Boom. This isn’t charity. It’s a calculated lock on AI infrastructure that could reshape the industry. Anthropic confirmed the deal Friday. Google spokespeople stayed mum beyond that. The cash backs a massive compute expansion. Five gigawatts of power starting 2027. Enough electricity for every home in Minnesota, as The New York Times put it. Google Cloud supplies tensor processing units, or TPUs, fueling Anthropic’s Claude models. Partners. Rivals. Same time. And this comes days after Amazon pledged up to $25 billion—$5 billion upfront, $20 billion more on milestones. Anthropic commits $100 billion back to AWS over a decade. Total new commitments this month: $65 billion from the cloud giants. Add Google’s prior stake, exceeding $3 billion for about 14%, and Amazon’s earlier $8 billion.…