Anthropic and Amazon agree $100bn AI infrastructure deal

Anthropic has committed to spend more than $100bn on chips and computing power from Amazon as it seeks to bulk up its capacity after running up against supply constraints.

The $380bn AI lab will receive up to 5 gigawatts of new capacity to train and run its model Claude over the next decade, with close to a fifth of that arriving this year, it announced on Monday.

Amazon will invest $5bn into Anthropic immediately at its current valuation and up to a further $20bn over time.

Anthropic and rivals including OpenAI have sought to lock in as much computing power as possible in order to serve their models to customers and continue their turbocharged growth.

The success of Anthropic's AI tools this year, in particular its coding tool Claude Code, has tested the company's ability to reliably serve customers. The start-up has suffered a number of outages this year.

Dario Amodei, chief executive of Anthropic, said: "Our users tell us Claude is increasingly essential to how they work and we need to build the infrastructure to keep pace with rapidly growing demand."

Earlier this month, the group announced deals with Google and Broadcom which will add another roughly 5GW over the coming years to its stockpile of computing power.

Late last year, Amodei criticised rivals that had pledged hundreds of billions of dollars to secure chips and infrastructure in remarks that were widely seen as a veiled reference to OpenAI.

"I think there are some players who are 'YOLO'-ing, who pull the risk dial too far," he told a New York Times conference in December, referring to the term 'you only live once'.

But the strain on Anthropic's computing resources in recent months has spurred dealmaking, said people with knowledge of the matter.

Like OpenAI, Anthropic has struck agreements which are circular in nature, taking investment from partners such as Amazon and then purchasing more of their chips.

Its need for data centre capacity will increase with the widespread release of the company's powerful new AI model, Mythos, which is available only to a small group of partners.

Anthropic's annualised revenue has surged from $9bn at the end of last year to more than $30bn. "Growth at this pace places an inevitable strain on our infrastructure," the company said on Monday, highlighting "reliability and performance" issues during peak hours.

"We are building the infrastructure needed to keep Claude at the frontier and reliably serve our growing customer base."

Amazon has invested $8bn in Anthropic since 2023. In February, the group agreed to invest $15bn in OpenAI immediately and up to $50bn over time.

Anthropic is one of the largest customers for Amazon's Trainium series of chips. The cloud giant sought to leverage its relationship with the start-up to position its semiconductors as a rival to Nvidia's popular GPUs.

Andy Jassy, Amazon's chief executive, on Monday said the deal "reflects the progress we've made together on custom silicon".

The cloud giant is building vast data centre capacity for the AI lab, including through Project Rainier, a large data centre programme beginning with a 2.4GW campus in New Carlisle, Indiana.

OpenAI turned to Amazon late last year to secure capacity after it renegotiated the terms of an exclusive deal it held with Microsoft.