Amazon has significantly deepened its investment in Anthropic, the developer behind the Claude AI models, by committing an additional $5 billion. This new funding brings Amazon's immediate total investment in the AI startup to $13 billion. A key aspect of this deal is to enable Anthropic to acquire up to 5 gigawatts (GW) of AI chips from Amazon, essential for training and running its popular Claude models.
This latest move follows Amazon's prior $8 billion investment in Anthropic. According to the Wall Street Journal, the companies have also agreed on the potential for Amazon to commit an additional $20 billion in the future, contingent on achieving specific commercial milestones.
The substantial cash infusion and the prospect of securing more computing resources arrive at a critical juncture for Anthropic. Earlier this year, the company experienced a massive surge in paid subscriptions for Claude-related services. This spike in demand, coupled with the strain on the existing cloud compute infrastructure supporting Claude, has contributed to performance issues and occasional outages for thousands of users.
"Growth at this pace places an inevitable strain on our infrastructure; our unprecedented consumer growth, in particular, has impacted reliability and performance for free, Pro, Max, and Team users, especially during peak hours," Anthropic stated in its announcement regarding the Amazon investment.
Anthropic indicated that the new agreement with Amazon will deliver "meaningful compute in the next three months" and nearly 1 GW in total before the end of 2026. The company did not specify the exact timeframe for when it expects to secure the full 5 GW of new compute capacity from Amazon.