Amazon invests an additional $25 billion in Anthropic.

      Amazon has made a second consecutive major investment in a leading AI lab, following a similar $50 billion deal with OpenAI two months earlier. Anthropic now has an annualized revenue of $30 billion. This new partnership secures Anthropic's commitment to AWS’s Trainium chips via Trainium4 and ensures up to 5 gigawatts of computing power for its Claude models.

      As part of an expanded agreement, Amazon plans to invest up to $25 billion in Anthropic, the company responsible for the Claude model family, while also locking in over $100 billion in cloud services expenditures by Anthropic toward Amazon Web Services over the next ten years. Amazon will make an immediate $5 billion investment, with an additional potential $20 billion tied to specific commercial benchmarks. This adds to the $8 billion Amazon has already pledged to Anthropic since 2023, bringing the total prospective investment from Amazon to about $33 billion.

      The deal’s structure is noteworthy; Amazon isn’t providing a straightforward $25 billion payment, with most of the funding dependent on performance outcomes. Concurrently, the $100 billion commitment from Anthropic to AWS does not represent a payment, but rather a pledge to procure cloud compute resources, custom AI chips, and infrastructure services from Amazon over the decade. Essentially, Amazon invests in Anthropic, which in turn uses those funds for Amazon’s services. A similar model was used when Amazon invested $50 billion in OpenAI, also linked to a $100 billion cloud commitment.

      Central to this agreement is Amazon’s Trainium chip series, its in-house alternative to Nvidia GPUs for AI training and inference. The deal encompasses existing Trainium2, the upcoming Trainium3, and the yet-to-be-released Trainium4, in addition to millions of Graviton CPU cores.

      Under the agreement, Anthropic secures up to 5 gigawatts of power to train and deploy its Claude models. Amazon anticipates a significant increase in Trainium2 capacity coming in the second quarter of 2026, with nearly one gigawatt of combined Trainium2 and Trainium3 projected by the end of the year. This compute commitment directly responds to the rapidly increasing demand, as Anthropic’s annualized revenue has surged to $30 billion from about $9 billion at the end of 2025.

      The partnership also enhances the distribution of Anthropic's models. AWS customers will now have direct access to the complete Claude Platform through their existing AWS accounts, eliminating the need for separate credentials or billing processes. This goes beyond merely offering Claude through Amazon Bedrock, the managed AI marketplace; Claude is now the only frontier model accessible across all three major cloud platforms: AWS Bedrock, Google Cloud Vertex AI, and Microsoft Azure Foundry.

      The geopolitical context is significant for this deal. Anthropic currently cannot engage in Department of Defense contracts due to a supply-chain risk classification that it is challenging in court. This situation reflects a wider AI policy landscape where the Trump administration has pushed AI companies to relax safety regulations while simultaneously courting them for national security purposes.

      Dario Amodei, Anthropic’s CEO, has publicly navigated this tension. The momentum from the AWS deal and the implicit endorsement of Anthropic’s infrastructure scale serve as a response to critics, including OpenAI, who suggested last week that Anthropic had erred by not securing sufficient compute resources.

      In November 2025, Microsoft invested up to $5 billion in Anthropic in a separate arrangement that involved Anthropic committing to procure $30 billion of Azure compute capacity. The AWS deal far exceeds this arrangement, solidifying Amazon’s role as Anthropic’s primary infrastructure partner.

      The investment in this round is based on Anthropic’s latest valuation of $380 billion. Reports indicate that venture capital firms have been proposing capital at valuations exceeding $800 billion in anticipation of a potential IPO, though no such round has been officially announced.