Anthropic has 'unprecedented' demand - and it's leaning on Amazon for support

Amazon is investing another $5 billion in the maker of Claude

Amazon and Anthropic have been strategic partners since September 2023.

Amazon.com has had a close relationship with Anthropic for years - and now the companies are strengthening their financial and technological ties.

The e-commerce giant announced Monday afternoon that it will invest $5 billion in Anthropic currently and as much as $20 billion more down the line. These investments are on top of the $8 billion that Amazon (AMZN) had already poured into the artificial-intelligence startup.

Anthropic is committing to secure up to 5 gigawatts of Amazon's custom Trainium chips, which represents both an endorsement of Amazon's technology and a further sign that AI players are looking to diversify and expand their semiconductor supply in what's still a constrained market. The AI lab also committed to spend more than $100 billion on Amazon Web Services over the next decade.

"Our custom AI silicon offers high performance at significantly lower cost for customers, which is why it's in such hot demand," Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said in a blog post.

Amazon's stock was up 2.7% in Monday's extended session.

The push to expand Anthropic's capacity comes as the AI lab touts its "unprecedented consumer growth." Earlier this month, the company said its revenue run rate had exceeded $30 billion, up from $9 billion at the end of 2025. Meanwhile, rival OpenAI said this month it was generating some $2 billion a month, which implying that it's trailing behind Anthropic on a run-rate basis, according to Jefferies.

Anthropic said in a blog post that growing at such a pace is placing an "inevitable strain" on its infrastructure, which has impacted reliability and performance for both free and paid users. In addition to the Amazon deal, Anthropic also recently expanded its relationship with Broadcom (AVGO) to access about 3.5 GW of Google's tensor processing units beginning in 2027.

"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," Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei said in a statement.

The deal with Anthropic underscores Amazon's importance in the ecosystem. A recently leaked memo from OpenAI touted the company's relationship with Amazon as key to growing its enterprise business.

Amazon is expected to devote most of its projected $200 billion in capital expenditures this year toward AI. In a letter to shareholders this month, Jassy said AWS's AI revenue run rate was over $15 billion for the first quarter of 2026. Its custom chips business also has an annual revenue run rate of more than $20 billion, he said.

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