Anthropic's $518B Cloud Bet Makes AMZN Look Stronger

A draft of Anthropic's initial public offering prospectus, reported by Reuters, puts a staggering number on the AI lab's future spending: $518 billion on cloud, computing, and infrastructure obligations in coming years. This isn't just a headline figure -- it's a roadmap of where one of the world's most important AI companies plans to spend its money.

Amazon shareholders already know where a big chunk is headed. In April, Anthropic committed more than $100 billion over 10 years to Amazon Web Services (AWS). A second Reuters report broke down the total by supplier, showing about $110 billion is owed to Amazon between May 2026 and April 2036. That's roughly a fifth of the entire $518 billion commitment.

But AWS isn't the only winner. Anthropic has also announced a 5-gigawatt deal with Alphabet and Broadcom, $30 billion of Azure capacity from Microsoft, and a $50 billion plan to build data centers with Fluidstack in Texas and New York. Still, Anthropic said in April that it keeps choosing AWS as its main training and cloud provider for mission-critical workloads.

The draft also gives a rare look at Anthropic's financials. The company posted a net loss of $42 billion in 2025, though about $34 billion of that was an accounting charge linked to financing that could later become Anthropic shares. On an operating basis, it lost over $8 billion on revenue of almost $4.6 billion. But the newer numbers are moving much faster -- revenue reportedly hit $4.73 billion in Q1 2026 alone, then passed $11.5 billion in Q2, up over 14-fold year over year.

For Amazon, the math is straightforward. Spread evenly, the AWS commitment comes to more than $10 billion a year. That would be about 7% of the $148 billion in sales AWS pulled in over the 12 months through June. It's a meaningful chunk of revenue, but not a make-or-break number for the segment.

The bigger question is whether Anthropic can afford it. In 2025, Anthropic spent under $7.33 billion on compute and infrastructure from all suppliers combined. But if its revenue growth stays anywhere near recent rates -- Q2 2026 revenue was up over 14-fold year over year -- then $10 billion a year to AWS looks manageable. That's the key insight from the draft: Anthropic's revenue is catching up to its bills.

There's a concentration risk, though. Almost one quarter of Anthropic's 2025 revenue came from just two customers, and the company warned that many of its biggest clients aren't locked into long-term contracts. In other words, the obligations to AWS last 10 years, but much of the revenue meant to cover them isn't locked in at all.

Amazon also has skin in the game as an investor. It has put $18 billion into Anthropic, and those holdings were booked at around $190 billion on June 30 -- about 7% of Amazon's $2.7 trillion market cap. The preferred-stock markups feed into Amazon's reported profit, too. Its Q2 net income more than tripled year over year to $62.6 billion, but that included $53.4 billion of pre-tax, non-operating income, mostly from its Anthropic investments. So Amazon's trailing earnings arguably overstate what its core businesses make.