Anthropic agrees to spend over $100bn on Amazon AI computing

In short: Anthropic says it will spend more than $100bn on chips and computing power from Amazon over the next decade to better run its Claude AI tools.

What happened

Anthropic, the company behind the Claude chatbot and coding tools, has agreed to buy more than $100bn worth of computing power and computer chips from Amazon. Think of computing power as the electricity and engines inside a huge factory that makes AI run.

Anthropic said it will get up to 5 gigawatts of new capacity to train and run Claude over 10 years. A gigawatt is a measure of power, and 5 gigawatts is roughly the amount used by a few million homes. Anthropic said close to a fifth of that new capacity should arrive this year.

Amazon also plans to invest $5bn into Anthropic right away, and up to another $20bn over time. The Financial Times reports that deals like this can be “circular”, meaning a partner invests in an AI company, and the AI company then spends much of that money buying the partner’s computing services.

Anthropic has faced reliability problems this year, including outages, as more people use Claude, especially its Claude Code product for writing and editing software. The company said fast growth has strained its systems during peak hours.

Why it matters

When popular AI tools go down, it can interrupt work for people and businesses that depend on them, like a busy website crashing during a sale. This deal shows how much physical infrastructure, like data centers and specialized chips, is needed to keep AI services stable as more people use them.

Source: Financial Times