Anthropic has been one of the hottest names in the AI and tech world over the past few years. Its AI model, Claude, has become a true competitor to tools like ChatGPT and Gemini, and it seems to be picking up more steam by the day.
One company that has seen Anthropic's vision is Amazon (AMZN +3.23%), which made an initial $1.25 billion investment in it in 2023. By November 2024, Amazon had a total of $8 billion invested in Anthropic, and now it's back at it.
Amazon recently announced it was making another $5 billion investment, with the possibility of buying an additional $20 billion stake down the road. Both companies will benefit from the partnership, no doubt, but one company clearly has more to gain.
Image source: The Motley Fool.
What Amazon and Anthropic's partnership entails
As part of the deal, Anthropic will secure up to 5 gigawatts (GW) of current and future computing capacity through Amazon's Trainium AI chips.
Anthropic has run into supply issues (which turn into speed issues) as its tools have become more popular and demand has skyrocketed, so more capacity will allow it to keep pace and cut back on some of the usage restrictions it has put in place.
On Amazon's end, it will receive more than $100 billion in guaranteed revenue over the next decade.
We won't have much insight into Anthropic's finances before its IPO, but a commitment this large signals that the company is growing at an extremely fast rate and expects that growth to continue for quite a while.
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Who benefits the most from the partnership?
If I had to choose the "winner" out of this deal, it would be Amazon. By investing $5 billion in Anthropic, it secured a $100 billion spending commitment, a high-level customer to help validate its new AI chips, and a likely lucrative payday when Anthropic goes public.
The spending commitment is pretty straightforward, but an underrated part of the deal is that Anthropic is using Amazon's AI chips. Right now, Nvidia has a relative stranglehold on the AI chip industry, and it has used that advantage to charge a premium for its chips. If Amazon's chips prove effective, they could be a reliable (and potentially cheaper) alternative to Nvidia's chips.
If a company like Anthropic -- which has top-tier AI models and huge computing needs -- can run its workloads on Amazon's chips, almost any other customer should be able to as well.
Regarding Amazon's potential payday when Anthropic goes public, various sources speculate that it owns a mid-teens percentage of the AI company, but there's no way yet for outsiders to know precisely the size of its stake. But with some projecting Anthropic will be valued at as much as $800 billion in its IPO, Amazon will surely come away with a hefty return on its investment.
