Amazon is preparing another multi-billion dollar investment in the AI startup Anthropic.

Already today, Amazon is among the largest shareholders of Anthropic, a company recently valued at $61.5 billion. The commitment is not only financially motivated: The tech giant is building one of the largest data center clusters in the world in Indiana—“Project Rainier”—which, with a power demand of 2.2 gigawatts, surpasses even Oracle's ambitious plans for OpenAI. Overall, Amazon's investment volume in the region now amounts to over $20 billion.

Anthropic uses Amazon's proprietary Trainium2 chips to develop large language models, including the Claude model series, which is already integrated into Alexa+ and Prime Video. In return, Amazon positions itself as the company's preferred cloud and training partner – a role that Google, despite its own stake of about 14%, has not fulfilled to the same extent.

The closer interconnection also has strategic reasons: Anthropic was founded by former OpenAI employees who deliberately chose a Public Benefit Corporation – a model that grants investors equity rights but no voting shares. This is intended to ensure the company's independence. Compared to OpenAI's heavily regulated participation structure, Amazon managers see a more robust and long-term stable framework in this approach.

At the same time, close cooperation also carries risks. Microsoft's $14 billion alliance with OpenAI has brought technological advantages but is burdened by structural tensions. Amazon, on the other hand, relies on a mix of infrastructure dominance, technical integration, and gradual capital commitment – for example, through convertible bonds, only a portion of which have been converted into shares so far.

While Google focuses on its own Gemini model series, Amazon has clearly opted for a partnership model with Anthropic – supported by targeted sales of Claude models to cloud customers. According to an investor, Amazon's sales team is "significantly more present" here than Google's.

The two companies are already discussing additional locations for new data centers to ensure computing power for future models. AWS Vice President David Brown put it this way: "The goal is to always be well ahead of customer needs - we create the illusion of unlimited capacity.