Two months after investing $50 billion in OpenAI and striking a $100 billion cloud deal, Amazon announced a similar arrangement with its original AI partner, Anthropic: up to $25 billion in new investment and a $100 billion-plus commitment to AWS over 10 years. Read More
Amazon and Anthropic announced an expanded partnership Monday that includes up to $25 billion in new investment and more than $100 billion in cloud commitments over 10 years. (GeekWire File Photo / Todd Bishop) Amazon is now running the same playbook with both of the world’s top AI labs. Two months after investing $50 billion in OpenAI and striking a $100 billion cloud deal, Amazon announced a similar arrangement Monday with its original AI partner, Anthropic: up to $25 billion in new investment and a $100 billion-plus commitment to AWS over 10 years. The deal also secures Anthropic up to 5 gigawatts of capacity on Amazon’s custom Trainium chips, a direct rebuttal to OpenAI’s claim last week that Anthropic made a “strategic misstep to not acquire enough compute” and was “operating on a meaningfully smaller curve.” In a blog post announcing the expanded Amazon deal, Anthropic acknowledged that surging consumer demand has strained its infrastructure, impacting reliability during peak hours — a pressure the expanded AWS deal is designed to relieve.
For perspective, a large nuclear power plant produces about 1 gigawatt, so Anthropic is securing the computing equivalent of up to five nuclear plants’ worth of capacity. As part of the deal, the full Claude Platform will be available directly within AWS, letting customers access Anthropic’s tools through their existing AWS account, billing, and security controls — a deeper integration than offering Claude through Amazon’s Bedrock marketplace. Amazon is investing $5 billion in Anthropic now, with up to $20 billion more tied to commercial milestones, on top of the $8 billion it previously invested, dating back to 2023, when Amazon first backed Anthropic.
The initial investment is at Anthropic’s latest valuation of $380 billion. It comes as both Anthropic and OpenAI prepare for potential IPOs, with each company seeking to demonstrate the long-term capacity commitments that public market investors will expect. “Our users tell us Claude is increasingly essential to how they work, and we need to build the infrastructure to keep pace with rapidly growing demand,” said Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei in a statement, noting that more than 100,000 customers are building on Claude through AWS.
Microsoft has also invested in both labs — putting more than $13 billion into OpenAI and up to $5 billion into Anthropic. The two Seattle-area tech giants are now placing parallel bets on the same two AI companies, each jockeying for position as AI reshapes the cloud market. “Anthropic’s commitment to run its large language models on AWS Trainium for the next decade reflects the progress we’ve made together on custom silicon,” said Amazon CEO Andy Jassy in a statement.
Anthropic’s cloud commitment spans Amazon’s Trainium2 through Trainium4, with the option to purchase future generations of Amazon’s custom silicon as they become available. The companies said nearly 1 gigawatt of Trainium2 and Trainium3 capacity will come online by the end of this year, and that Anthropic currently uses more than 1 million Trainium2 chips to train and serve Claude.
