Anthropic buys Humanloop talent, spending on data centres to reach $3 trillion: This week's news roundup

Another acqui-hire in the AI space, this time by Anthropic, and Perplexity wants to buy Google Chrome. Here’s a look at the stories that caught our attention this week.

Anthropic snares Humanloop AI talent

With the race to secure top AI talent showing no signs of losing momentum, Anthropic has hired the founding team behind Humanloop, a startup which specialises in enterprise-facing tooling – prompt management, model evaluation, observability, safety workflows and LLM monitoring. Humanloop’s three co-founders, CEO Raza Habib, CTO Peter Hayes, and CPO Jordan Burgess, have all joined Anthropic, together with a dozen engineers and researchers. Terms of the deal have not been disclosed, although Anthropic has confirmed it did not acquire Humanloop’s assets or its intellectual property. 

It’s the type of transaction the tech and business press calls an acqui-hire, and one we’ve previously seen when Google bought DeepMind and Cursor bought Koala, among others. It avoids the scrutiny and legal, financial, and integration complexities of a full acquisition and means Anthropic can quickly onboard a team with deep domain knowledge.

Anthropic has been expanding into enterprise and governmental AI contracts and the addition of the Humanloop team strengthens this push. As a TechCrunch article commented: “What Humanloop’s team is bringing to Anthropic is experience developing the tools that help enterprises run safe, reliable AI at scale.”

Perplexity bids for Google Chrome

Perplexity AI has made an unsolicited $34.5 billion cash bid for Google’s Chrome browser, an amount that’s more than double its own valuation. Its bid is timed to coincide with ongoing US antitrust scrutiny that could force Google to divest Chrome.

In 2024 a ruling from Judge Amit Mehta found that Google’s parent company Alphabet illegally maintained a monopoly over online search services and prevented rivals from developing their own products. He suggested selling Chrome as a possible remedy. Perplexity is seizing the opportunity to position itself for a potential divestiture, while also boosting its profile, grabbing plenty of headlines and signalling its future ambitions. 

Chrome accounts for over 3.5 billion users globally, so owning Chrome would give Perplexity unparalleled access to user behaviour and browsing data. For its part however, Alphabet has given no indication it’s willing to sell the browser and observers say the US courts are also unlikely to force the company to divest itself of Chrome when they evaluate remedies in the antitrust case. There’s also the question of whether it’s really a credible bid. Analysts have tended to the view that it’s speculative and promotional rather than serious – Cantor Fitzgerald, for example, estimates Chrome’s standalone value to be near $140 billion rather than the $34.5 billion put up by Perplexity. 

Chinese chips delay DeepSeek’s next model

Chinese AI company DeepSeek’s next AI model has been delayed by attempts to use Chinese chips, according to the Financial Times and others. After pressure from the Chinese government, DeepSeek initially planned to train its R2 model entirely using Huawei’s Ascend chips, the FT reports, but ran into numerous technical and reliability issues and had to revert to using Nvidia chips for training. The delay underscores the gap between national self-sufficiency aspirations and technological readiness. While China might be pushing for domestic hardware, the AI ecosystem appears still to be anchored in Nvidia.

Data centre infrastructure spend to reach $3 trillion

Another report in the Financial Times highlights the scale of the data centre infrastructure needed to power the AI ecosystem, calling it “one of the biggest movements of capital in modern history”. Google, Amazon, Microsoft and Meta will spend more than $400 billion on data centres in 2026, on top of more than $350 billion this year, the FT reports. 

Historically data centres have been self funded, but such is the scale of the computing power needed for generative AI, this is no longer viable. Morgan Stanley estimates global spending on data centres will reach almost $3 trillion between now and 2029, with about half of that funding coming from investors and developers.

Google launches preferred sources feature

Google this week launched a preferred sources feature in Google Search, meaning that users can personalise their searches for news to reflect outlets they trust and want to see more often in a search. Users can now select their preferred sources from Top Stories, and then Search will show them higher in the results.

The feature was tested in Google Labs, with Google saying users really value the ability to choose their own trusted sources. It’s currently only in English to users in the US and India, with plans for a broader rollout over time.