Amazon's Anthropic Stake Swells to $190 Billion, Trumps Alphabet's SpaceX Investment

Amazon's investment in Anthropic has become a significant contributor to its earnings. The company has reported over $50 billion in non-operating pretax income tied to revaluations of its Anthropic stake, which is now worth nearly $190 billion. This increase is largely due to the private-market valuation of Anthropic climbing towards the trillion-dollar mark.

The investment is not just about equity gains; Amazon also benefits from a long-term commitment by Anthropic to spend over $100 billion on AWS technologies and custom Trainium chips. This partnership will provide up to 5 gigawatts of compute capacity for training and running Claude models on Amazon's cloud.

In contrast, Alphabet's stake in SpaceX has become a liquid asset with a clear market value following the company's IPO. The original $900 million investment from 2015 has turned into a mid-single-digit-percentage stake worth around $80 billion to $90 billion at recent prices, representing a gain of more than 90 times the initial outlay.

The increased transparency due to the SpaceX IPO may inject volatility into Alphabet's reported earnings and make it harder for investors to separate the company's core operating performance from market noise. Much of Alphabet's multibillion-dollar position is still locked up, as insiders' shares will be phased in over the next year or so.