Anthropic to Spend $100 Billion on Amazon Cloud and Custom AI Chips

Anthropic committed to spending more than $100 billion on Amazon Web Services and the company's custom Trainium chips over the next decade, as Amazon announced a fresh $5 billion investment in the artificial intelligence startup on Monday, with the potential for up to $20 billion in additional payments if certain commercial milestones are met. The deal, disclosed April 21, brings Amazon's total investment in Anthropic to $13 billion, following earlier rounds in 2023 and 2024. As part of the agreement, Anthropic secured up to 5 (gigawatts) — computing capacity for training and running Claude AI models of current and future chip capacity to train and run its Claude models, with close to a fifth of that arriving this year, according to the Financial Times. Anthropic, recently valued at $380 billion, said its annualized revenue has surged from $9 billion at the end of last year to more than $30 billion, a pace of growth that has strained its infrastructure. „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.” — Dario Amodei via Financial Times

Infrastructure outages drove Anthropic to lock in capacity The deal was driven in large part by a computing power crunch that has caused outages, throttling, and slower performance for Claude users in recent months. The Financial Times reported that the strain on Anthropic's computing resources, spurred by surging demand for its coding tool Claude Code, accelerated the company's dealmaking. Some customers switched to rival AI models out of frustration with the disruptions, according to the Wall Street Journal. Anthropic said on Monday that the company had faced "reliability and performance" issues during peak hours, adding that "growth at this pace places an inevitable strain on our infrastructure." The company also announced earlier in April an expanded partnership with Alphabet's Google and Broadcom, adding multiple gigawatts of capacity on their TPU chips, bringing its total new capacity additions to roughly 10 gigawatts across both deals. Anthropic also noted that its powerful new AI model, Mythos, is currently available only to a small group of partners, with a wider release expected to increase demand further. „This deal reflects the progress we've made together on custom silicon.” — Andy Jassy via Financial Times

Amazon's Trainium chips positioned as Nvidia rival At the center of the agreement is Amazon's custom Trainium chip series, which Amazon has sought to position as a competitor to Nvidia's dominant graphics processing units. The Anthropic deal specifically covers Trainium2 through Trainium4 chips, even though Trainium4 chips are not yet available, according to TechCrunch. The latest chip in the series, Trainium3, was released in December. Anthropic also secured the option to purchase capacity on future Amazon chips as they become available. In October, Amazon opened one of the largest AI data centers built for Anthropic in Indiana, known as Project Rainier, powered by half a million Trainium2 chips, with that number set to ultimately double. The circular structure of the deal — where Anthropic receives investment from Amazon and then purchases Amazon's chips and cloud services — mirrors arrangements common across the AI industry. Amazon has said it plans to spend $200 billion on capital expenditures this year, much of it on AI-related investments including new data centers.

Amazon first invested $4 billion in Anthropic in 2023, establishing the e-commerce and cloud computing giant as a leading backer of the AI startup. A second $4 billion round followed in 2024. Anthropic was founded in 2021 by former members of OpenAI, including siblings Dario Amodei and Daniela Amodei. The company focuses on AI safety and develops the Claude family of large language models. Amazon Web Services is the world's largest provider of cloud services.

Amazon's OpenAI deal set the template two months earlier The Anthropic agreement echoes a deal Amazon struck with OpenAI in February 2026, when Amazon agreed to invest $15 billion in OpenAI immediately and up to $50 billion over time, as part of a $110 billion funding round that valued OpenAI at $730 billion on a pre-money basis, according to TechCrunch. Both deals were structured partly as cloud infrastructure services rather than straight cash, reflecting a broader pattern in the AI industry of circular investment arrangements. The Wall Street Journal noted that the Anthropic deal comes ahead of expected public offerings from both Anthropic and OpenAI, as competition in the AI sector intensifies. Venture capital firms have reportedly been offering Anthropic capital in a deal that would value the company at $800 billion or more, according to TechCrunch, though no such round has been announced. The scale of mutual financial commitments across the industry has drawn scrutiny, with Dario Amodei himself warning in December at a New York Times conference that some players were taking excessive risks. „I think there are some players who are 'YOLO'-ing, who pull the risk dial too far.” — Dario Amodei via Financial Times

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