Anthropic raises $5 billion from Amazon in exchange for $100 billion in cloud spending

Amazon has put another $5 billion into Anthropic and received a commitment in return: the AI startup will spend $100 billion on AWS cloud infrastructure. The deal instantly became one of the most discussed in the industry, less because of the amount than because of its structure.

The scheme works like this: Amazon invests money in Anthropic, and Anthropic in turn takes on multi-year commitments to use AWS computing capacity. In other words, money leaves the corporation for the portfolio company and returns as revenue. TechCrunch calls it a "circular AI deal," and that is the very term Amazon itself uses to describe it.

This is not Amazon's first investment in Anthropic. In 2023, the company pledged up to $4 billion. In 2024, it added another $2.75 billion. Now, with the new tranche, Amazon's total commitments exceed $8 billion. That puts it on a par with Microsoft, which invested comparable sums in OpenAI.

The $100 billion commitment to AWS looks astronomical, but in the context of the AI race the figures are not far-fetched. Training and inference for large language models demand enormous computing resources. The $100 billion is not a one-year advance but a multi-year commitment over a 5-10 year horizon, spread out as the company's needs grow.

For Amazon, it is strategically important for AWS to keep Anthropic on its platform and stop Google or Microsoft from luring this customer away. Anthropic already uses AWS to train its Claude models. The two sides are also developing joint products: Anthropic provides its models through Amazon Bedrock, AWS's enterprise AI service.

Circular arrangements like this raise questions among regulators. When a large tech company invests in an AI startup and the startup commits to spend that money back, the line between a strategic partnership and a disguised merger blurs. Antitrust authorities in the US and Europe are already examining such structures. So far no deal has been blocked, but regulatory pressure is growing.

For the industry, this round is a signal: the race for computing infrastructure is accelerating. Companies that control GPU clusters and cloud platforms gain a structural advantage, since they fund AI companies and earn money from their growth at the same time. Amazon, Microsoft and Google are building exactly these closed ecosystems.

Meanwhile, Anthropic remains one of the few independent AI labs with a real chance of competing with OpenAI at the level of foundation models. The new round provides a financial cushion and access to infrastructure, but it also deepens its dependence on a single cloud provider.