Why Anthropic's fresh $183 billion valuation is good news for Amazon

By Britney Nguyen

The AI startup's recent funding could boost spending on AWS and lift Amazon's earnings per share

Anthropic, led by Dario Amodei, just hauled in a big new funding round.

Amazon.com Inc. might have just had its own "Microsoft-OpenAI moment," according to some analysts, after the artificial-intelligence startup the technology giant backs raised fresh capital that they say is likely to go back into its cloud business and boost its AI competitiveness.

Anthropic, which focuses on developing safe AI, said on Tuesday that it completed a $13 billion Series F fundraising round, giving the company a $183 billion post-money valuation - almost three times its $61.5 billion valuation from earlier this year.

The new money could set Anthropic up to accelerate its spending on Amazon Web Services, Roth Capital Partners analysts said in a Wednesday note, and "bodes well" for any announcements coming up about Amazon's (AMZN) massive multisite data center called Project Rainier. The project to provide computing power for Anthropic was announced in December and is seen by the analysts as competition for xAI's Colossus and Meta's Prometheus supercomputers. AWS is Anthropic's main cloud provider, and the startup uses the company's Trainium and Inferentia chips for training and running its models.

In November, Amazon raised its investment in Anthropic to $8 billion and said it would keep its status as a minority investor.

According to Roth's estimates, Amazon owns a 15% to 19% share of Anthropic, and the startup could spend up to $5 billion on AWS next year. Wall Street is projecting AWS's revenue to reach $150 billion in 2026, the analysts noted. This year, the analysts estimate Anthropic will spend between $1.5 billion and $2 billion on its cloud services.

There are investment-related benefits as well. The Roth team sees the funding round possibly contributing a bump to Amazon's third-quarter earnings per share, as the level of investment allows Amazon to treat it as a securities investment.

Alphabet Inc.'s (GOOGL) (GOOG) Google could also benefit, the analysts said, because it is estimated to own between 12% and 14% of the startup.

Meanwhile, Project Rainier, which uses Amazon's Trainium2 chips, has been rolling out in the U.S. "with full activation expected throughout 2025," the analysts said. They see Rainier becoming one of the world's largest supercomputers for AI training when it's finished and helping to challenge Nvidia Corp.'s (NVDA) dominance with graphics processing units.

In its funding announcement, Anthropic said its run-rate revenue reached more than $5 billion by August - eight months after reaching about $1 billion earlier this year. It launched its Claude family of large language models in March 2023. The startup has more than 300,000 business customers, and its "large accounts" - or customers that contribute more than $100,000 to run-rate revenue - have increased nearly sevenfold in the past year, it said.

-Britney Nguyen

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09-03-25 1110ET