Amazon.com Inc (NASDAQ: AMZN) announced on Monday April 21 that it will invest up to $25 billion in AI startup Anthropic, on top of the $8 billion it had already committed, in an expanded partnership that includes Anthropic pledging to spend more than $100 billion on Amazon Web Services technologies over the next ten years. Amazon shares rose more than 2 percent in premarket trading on Tuesday on the back of the announcement.
The structure of the deal has two components. Amazon is deploying $5 billion immediately at Anthropic’s latest valuation of $380 billion, with a further $20 billion tied to commercial milestones that were not publicly specified. In return, Anthropic commits to using Amazon’s custom Trainium AI chip family — including Trainium2, Trainium3 and future generations — as the foundation of its compute infrastructure, with up to 5 gigawatts of capacity being made available under the agreement.
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei said in a statement that Claude is “increasingly essential to how they work” for enterprise customers and that the company needed to build infrastructure to keep pace with demand, attributing recent reliability issues to strain caused by a sharp rise in both developer and consumer usage.
The deal lands two months after Amazon separately agreed to invest up to $50 billion in OpenAI, putting the company in the unusual position of being a major backer of both leading frontier AI labs. Amazon CEO Andy Jassy has already flagged that the company’s custom chip Business has doubled its annualised revenue run-rate to over $20 billion, and the Anthropic deal is widely read as validation that Trainium is gaining genuine traction as an alternative to Nvidia Corporation (NASDAQ: NVDA) silicon in AI training workloads.
Truist Securities analyst Youssef Squali said in a note that the partnership “deepens Amazon’s relationship with Anthropic and shows that Trainium is gaining momentum and share of AI training and inference.”
Not all commentary was uniformly positive. Cloud economics expert Corey Quinn raised questions on social media about how much of Amazon’s investment was denominated in AWS cloud credits rather than cash — a concern that surfaces regularly with hyperscaler AI deals and relates to whether the headline figures reflect genuine capital transfer or service commitments that loop between the same balance sheets.
CNBC’s Jim Cramer addressed the circular deal criticism directly, arguing that “no earnings are being puffed here” and pointing to the data centre return on investment as the real story. Amazon is trading around $248 with a P/E of approximately 34.6 times trailing earnings, considerably below its five-year median of 53.6 times, and reports Q1 2026 earnings next week.