Key points:

• Amazon shares rise 3%
• Amazon bets on Anthropic
• Anthropic says “right back at ya”

Amazon said it aims to build out AI infrastructure. Anthropic will, in turn, spend over $100 billion on AWS.

🤖 Amazon Doubles Down

• Shares of Amazon AMZN rose about 3% premarket after the company announced plans to invest up to $25 billion in Anthropic, expanding an existing partnership already backed by roughly $8 billion in prior funding.
• The deal includes an immediate $5 billion investment, with up to $20 billion more tied to commercial milestones — effectively turning Amazon into one of Anthropic’s long-term infrastructure anchors.
• Anthropic’s latest valuation sits near $380 billion, underscoring just how expensive the AI arms race has become. In this market, compute capacity is the new oil field.

☁️ $100B AWS Commitment

• In turn, Anthropic said it plans to spend more than $100 billion over the next decade on Amazon Web Services infrastructure, including current and future generations of Trainium — Amazon’s custom-built AI chips designed to compete with industry-standard accelerators.
• The startup also secured up to 5 gigawatts of compute capacity for training and deploying its Claude large language models. That’s hyperscale territory — the kind normally reserved for national grids, not chatbots.
• CEO Andy Jassy framed the agreement as validation of AWS’s custom silicon strategy, signaling Amazon wants to compete not just on cloud storage — but on the hardware powering the AI economy itself.

📊 Hyperscaler Arms Race

• Amazon previously said it expects roughly $200 billion in capital expenditures this year, largely directed toward AI infrastructure. Translation: warehouses were yesterday’s expansion story — data centers are today’s.
• Anthropic named AWS its primary cloud provider in 2023 and its main training partner in 2024, though it still maintains partnerships with rivals like Microsoft and Google.

Source: Tradingview