Anthropic secures $5B from Amazon in expanded cloud deal

Anthropic announced on Monday that Amazon has agreed to invest a fresh $5 billion in the artificial-intelligence company. This transaction brings Amazon’s total investment in Anthropic to $13 billion. In return, Anthropic has agreed to spend over $100 billion on Amazon Web Services (AWS) over the next 10 years. Through this cloud-spending commitment, Anthropic is obtaining up to 5 GW of new computing capacity to train and run its Claude AI models. Gigawatts (GW) measure the electrical power capacity required to run the data centers that host these computing resources. This allocation of power underscores the physical infrastructure required to sustain modern artificial intelligence development.

The structure of the agreement closely mirrors a deal Amazon struck with OpenAI two months ago. In that transaction, Amazon joined a funding round that was structured partly as cloud infrastructure services rather than straight cash. To highlight the scale of these infrastructure-linked investments:

• The Anthropic Deal: Amazon is investing a fresh $5 billion (bringing its total to $13 billion), while Anthropic commits to spend over $100 billion on AWS over 10 years to secure up to 5 GW of computing capacity.
• The OpenAI Deal: Amazon joined a $110 billion funding round for OpenAI two months ago, contributing $50 billion to the round, which valued the ChatGPT creator at a $730 billion pre-money valuation.

At the center of the partnership is Anthropic’s commitment to run its workloads on Amazon’s custom silicon. The deal focuses on AWS hardware, specifically Graviton, which is Amazon’s custom central processing unit (CPU), and Trainium, Amazon’s custom AI accelerator chip. Under the agreement, Anthropic secures access to current and future generations of these chips to train and run its Claude models. This includes securing the option to buy capacity on future Amazon chips as they become available. Amazon released its Trainium3 chip in December, and this partnership ensures Anthropic remains positioned to leverage Amazon’s hardware roadmap.

The capital injection comes amid interest from traditional venture capitalists. Venture capital firms have reportedly been offering Anthropic capital in a deal that would value the AI startup at $800 billion or more. This potential valuation highlights the soaring price tag of building and scaling independent AI models.

Why it matters

This deal signals a shift where AI funding is increasingly tied to long-term cloud infrastructure commitments, mirroring Amazon’s recent strategy with other major AI labs.