Anthropic Plans to Spend $518 Billion on Cloud and Data Centers. More Than $100 Billion Is Already Promised to Amazon.
Anthropic Plans to Spend $518 Billion on Cloud and Data Centers. More Than $100 Billion Is Already Promised to Amazon.
Daniel Sparks, The Motley FoolThu, October 1, 2026 at 12:57 AM UTC
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Image source: Getty Images.Key Points -
A draft prospectus reported by Reuters shows Anthropic plans $518 billion in cloud, computing and infrastructure obligations.
Anthropic's April commitment to AWS comes to over $10 billion a year on average.
Amazon's June 30 balance sheet carried its Anthropic holdings at around $190 billion.
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A draft of Anthropic's initial public offering (IPO) prospectus, reported by Reuters on Monday, Sept. 28, puts a number on the company's spending plans. The artificial intelligence (AI) lab plans to spend $518 billion on cloud, computing and infrastructure obligations in coming years, according to the draft.
Amazon(NASDAQ:AMZN) shareholders already know where some of this money is headed. In April, the Claude maker committed more than $100 billion over 10 years to Amazon Web Services (AWS), Amazon's cloud computing segment. That one contract is around a fifth of the $518 billion.
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The draft also shows how the customer behind that contract is doing. It shows large losses. But I think it also shows revenue rising fast enough to make the AWS commitment look affordable.
Is the AWS deal part of the $518 billion?
Yes. A second Reuters report on Tuesday, Sept. 29, split the total by supplier, and about $110 billion of it is owed to Amazon between May 2026 and April 2036. Like most of the $518 billion, that commitment has to be paid even if Anthropic's usage falls short.
And AWS isn't Anthropic's only supplier. The AI lab has also announced a 5-gigawatt deal with Google parent 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.
Anthropic's revenue is catching up to its bills
Spread evenly, the AWS commitment comes to more than $10 billion a year. Anthropic reportedly spent under that on compute and infrastructure from all suppliers combined in 2025 -- $7.33 billion.
For AWS, $10 billion a year would be about 7% of the $148 billion in sales the segment pulled in over the 12 months through June.
Anthropic's 2025 income statement is rough. Its net loss was $42 billion, though the reporting says around $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, not counting writedowns tied to past fundraising, on revenue of almost $4.6 billion.
But the newer numbers are moving much faster. Anthropic's revenue reportedly hit $4.73 billion in the first quarter of 2026 alone (more than in all of 2025). Second-quarter revenue then passed $11.5 billion, up over 14-fold from a year earlier and more than twice the first quarter.
If growth stays anywhere near this rate, $10 billion a year to AWS looks manageable.
The risk I'd watch is concentration. Almost one quarter of Anthropic's 2025 revenue was from just two customers, according to the draft. And the company warned that many of its biggest clients aren't locked into long-term contracts and could lower or stop spending.
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.
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Amazon's own stake
Not only does Amazon provide much of Anthropic's computing capacity, but it's also an investor in the AI lab.
Amazon has put $18 billion into Anthropic, split between $8 billion of convertible notes through 2025 and $10 billion of nonvoting preferred stock in the second quarter of 2026. Up to $15 billion extra is available under a financing deal.
On Amazon's balance sheet, these holdings were booked at around $190 billion on June 30 ($92.5 billion of preferred stock and $97.9 billion of convertible notes), with the values based mostly on the prices of Anthropic's private funding rounds. They were around $74 billion three months before and about $61 billion when 2025 ended.
The preferred-stock markups feed into Amazon's reported profit, too. Its second-quarter net income more than tripled year over year to $62.6 billion. But that total 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.
At around $246 a share as I write this, Amazon is worth about $2.7 trillion, so the stake is about 7% of the company on paper. A public listing at the reported valuation of over $2 trillion might shift these values again.
In the end, the draft doesn't change the size of the AWS contract. What it adds is evidence that Anthropic's revenue is rising fast enough to cover the contract, with two big customers as the main risk.
Of course, Anthropic hasn't filed its prospectus publicly yet, so the figures might still change. But for now, I think the numbers make Amazon's contract look stronger than it did before they came out.
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Daniel Sparks and his clients do not have positions in any of the stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Alphabet, Amazon, Broadcom, and Microsoft. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.
Source: “AOL Money”
