Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN) has a very big tenant. Anthropic’s draft IPO prospectus, as reported by Reuters, shows about $110 billion owed to Amazon Web Services (AWS) over roughly the next decade. Picture a landlord with a long lease, except this landlord also owns a stake in the tenant. That arrangement is the thread running through Amazon’s AI story, and it helps explain why the chip deals and model launches around it fit together.
A Lease You Can’t Walk Away From
Anthropic plans $518 billion of cloud, computing and infrastructure obligations in coming years. Amazon’s share traces back to a pledge of more than $100 billion over 10 years. Like most of that total, it’s owed even if Anthropic’s usage falls short. That gives Amazon a kind of revenue visibility that ordinary pay-as-you-go cloud usage doesn’t. And Amazon isn’t the only supplier, since Alphabet and Broadcom, Microsoft and Fluidstack all hold pieces of the plan.
Spread evenly, the AWS portion runs above $10 billion a year. Anthropic reportedly spent $7.33 billion on all of its suppliers combined in 2025, so this only looks comfortable if revenue keeps scaling. The draft gives us a reason to stay alert, since almost a quarter of 2025 revenue came from two customers. Many large clients also have no long-term commitment and could cut back. The bill is locked in, but the customers paying it aren’t.
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The Stake That Flatters The Profit Line
Amazon isn’t just a vendor here. It has put $18 billion into Anthropic, split between convertible notes and nonvoting preferred stock, with up to $15 billion more available. Those holdings are now carried at about $190 billion, up from about $61 billion at the end of 2025. The values rest mostly on Anthropic’s private funding rounds, so these are marks on paper rather than cash.
Those marks still reach the income statement. Second-quarter net income more than tripled to $62.6 billion, and $53.4 billion of pre-tax, non-operating income came mostly from the Anthropic investments. When a profit jump looks like that, it pays to ask what the core businesses contributed. One reading is that trailing earnings overstate their strength, and a public listing could shift the carrying values again.
Amazon Wants A Bigger Hand In Chips
While the Anthropic money grabs the headlines, Amazon is also spending on its own silicon. Synopsys and AWS announced a multi-year deal worth more than $1 billion, under which Amazon’s cloud unit will license chip design blueprints. Those designs are tuned for specific kinds of chips, a step beyond the common building blocks Synopsys started out licensing. AWS already designs Graviton processors and Trainium AI chips, though neither side said which will use the new blueprints.
Money flows the other way too, because Synopsys will adopt AWS computing and storage along with Amazon Bedrock. Amazon’s chip strategy leans on lower prices for cost-conscious customers, and buying proven designs fits that approach.
Bedrock shows up again on the model side. AWS now offers Claude Sonnet 5.5, a step up from Sonnet 5 for coding and knowledge work. You can reach it through Amazon Bedrock, which keeps data inside AWS with regional data residency, or through Claude Platform on AWS, which brings Anthropic’s native tools to the AWS Console with AWS billing. Put that next to the lease and the loop is clear. Anthropic buys capacity from AWS, AWS customers buy Anthropic’s models, and Amazon holds equity in the company at the center.
What Does Wall Street Think?
Hedge fund interest is climbing, with 369 funds holding Amazon in the most recent quarter, up from 353 in the prior one. Short sellers barely register at 0.83% of the float, so very few investors are betting against the stock. At 23.64 times forward earnings, the price assumes solid growth ahead without pricing in perfection.
What We Still Need To See
The big unknown is whether Anthropic’s revenue can carry a decade of fixed payments when so many of its customers are free to leave. The prospectus hasn’t been filed publicly, so these figures could still change. When it is, and when a listing puts a market price on Anthropic, you’ll see how well that $190 billion carrying value holds up.
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This article is originally published at Insider Monkey.
