Amazon Lends Anthropic $15 Billion to Buy $110 Billion of AWS Capacity From Amazon
A new Anthropic S-1 line shows Amazon lending the lab up to $15 billion tied to compute-delivery milestones, while nearly half of Anthropic's revenue now books gross through cloud marketplaces Amazon partly owns. Inside Amazon, a July-dated internal forecast shows Alexa+ being routed away from Claude to cut a $1.7 billion cloud bill.
Vincent Jiang · 3 min read
Anthropic$350B — Anthropic, private, latest valuation $350B, the AI lab behind Claude, filed its S-1 on October 26 for a Nasdaq listing under the ticker ANT, and the filing puts a number on who pays for the AI buildout's biggest contract stack: disclosed compute commitments of roughly $780–810 billion, about $261.3 billion of it falling after 2030, against $132 billion of cash and $10.8 billion of remaining performance obligations at June 30 1.
Amazon+1.86% — Amazon, up 1.86 percent today sits on every side of that stack. It reports earnings on October 29, and the Anthropic lines in this filing are the ones its own numbers now lean on 1.
The lender, the landlord and the customer are the same company
Of the up-to $77 billion in partner note facilities Anthropic can draw on, $15 billion is Amazon's, tied to compute-delivery milestones; Amazon already holds $6.2 billion of Anthropic convertible notes and has poured in $13 billion of equity, capped at 12% of the company 12.
Amazon is in for up to $34.2 billion across its loan, equity and notes
Data
| Value | |
|---|---|
| Partner note facility (up to) | $15B |
| Equity invested | $13B |
| Convertible notes held | $6.2B |
The pattern is simple: Amazon lends the lab the money that buys the AWS capacity, then sells the capacity under a $110 billion deal running through April 2036 that Anthropic cannot cancel except for material breach; the contract is take-or-pay, meaning the spend is committed regardless of usage, with a true-up requiring Anthropic to pay any shortfall if its spend comes in under the floor 2. AWS capacity for Anthropic only began coming online in May 2026, so the revenue is still arriving 1.
Gross revenue flatters the top line, and the clouds take their cut
When customers buy Claude through the AWS, GCP or Azure marketplaces, Anthropic books the full amount as revenue and the cloud provider's cut lands in Anthropic's own sales-and-marketing line. Marketplace revenue was 11% of the total in 2023, 32% in 2024, 47% in 2025 and 48% in the first half of 2026 1.
Nearly half of Anthropic's revenue now books gross through cloud marketplaces
Data
| Value | |
|---|---|
| 2023 | 11% of revenue |
| 2024 | 32% of revenue |
| 2025 | 47% of revenue |
| 1H26 | 48% of revenue |
On second-quarter revenue of $11.56 billion, about $46 billion annualized, that 48% gross share points to roughly $5.5–6 billion a quarter of billings moving through cloud marketplaces, and the split by cloud is undisclosed 1.
Amazon is already trimming its own Claude bill
The complication is that Amazon is trimming its own use of the product it finances. Business Insider reported in July that internal forecasts put Alexa+'s AWS cloud costs at roughly $1.7 billion in 2026, nearly triple the prior year, with Amazon working to lower the bill by relying less on Anthropic's models and routing more requests to its own, cheaper systems 3. The same stretch, Anthropic's revenue retention ran near 900% and consumption revenue was 80% of the total, so demand is not the question; the contract structure is 12.
Booked revenue or counterparty risk
The S-1 leaves third-quarter revenue, liquidity and the price range blank, all due in the S-1/A before pricing 1. Anthropic's margins are expected to compress as contracted capacity lands in 2027 and 2028, and roughly $261 billion of its commitments outlast 2030 1. Watch whether Amazon's earnings call treats the Anthropic contract as booked revenue or as counterparty risk. The money is the same either way; whose balance sheet it lives on is not.
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