Amazon's Giant Cloud Bet on AI Startup Anthropic Exposed

Amazon's cloud business has made a massive bet on Anthropic, an AI startup. The tech giant is both Anthropic's landlord and shareholder, according to the company's draft IPO prospectus.

Anthropic owes AWS over $110 billion over roughly the next decade, with Amazon's share of that total coming from a pledge of more than $100 billion over 10 years. This arrangement gives Amazon revenue visibility it wouldn't have otherwise, and Anthropic has agreed to pay Amazon even if its usage falls short.

Anthropic plans to spend $518 billion on cloud computing and infrastructure in the coming years, with AWS accounting for a significant portion of that total. Amazon's stake in Anthropic is valued at around $190 billion, up from about $61 billion at the end of 2025.