Amazon Drops $25 Billion on Anthropic While Still Funding OpenAI: The Wildest Bet in AI History

Two months after pouring $50 billion into OpenAI, Amazon just committed up to $25 billion into Anthropic. The Seattle giant is now bankrolling both sides of the biggest AI rivalry on the planet.

Amazon goes all in on Anthropic and Claude

The deal, announced on April 20, breaks down into $5 billion invested immediately and up to $20 billion more tied to commercial milestones. In return, Anthropic has committed to spending over $100 billion on AWS technologies over the next decade.

Combined with the $8 billion Amazon previously invested since 2023, this brings the total potential commitment to $33 billion. The initial tranche lands at Anthropic’s current valuation of $380 billion.

Custom chips at the heart of the Anthropic deal

Anthropic will secure up to 5 gigawatts of capacity across Amazon’s Trainium2 through Trainium4 chips, plus tens of millions of Graviton CPU cores. Over 100,000 customers already run Claude on Amazon Bedrock.

Anthropic’s annualized revenue has surged to $30 billion, up from roughly $9 billion at the end of 2025. That growth rate explains why VCs are now circling the company with offers at an $800 billion valuation.

Amazon’s double bet on AI rivals

Here’s the twist that makes this story wild. Just two months ago, Amazon invested $50 billion in OpenAI as part of a $110 billion funding round. The company is now the top financial backer of both ChatGPT and Claude.

The strategy is brutally pragmatic. AWS wants to be the default platform for every frontier AI model. Whoever wins the LLM race, Amazon sells the compute. OpenAI executives had been criticizing Anthropic for lacking compute. This deal answers that criticism directly.

Anthropic eyes a blockbuster IPO

With early IPO talks reportedly underway with Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan, and Morgan Stanley, a listing could arrive as soon as October 2026. Analysts expect a raise north of $60 billion, which would rank as the second-largest IPO in history.

For developers and enterprise customers, the takeaway is simple: AWS is locking itself in as the AI model supermarket where you pick between Claude and ChatGPT based on your needs. The real winner here might not be a model. It’s a cloud.