alt Hacker NewsThis isn’t “a few billion”. Maybe you missed some of the earlier comments. The hyperscalers have hundreds of billions of dollars tied up in deals with Anthropic. You’re delusional if you think these boards aren’t going to have a back room talk with Hegseth to smack some sense into him. This gets walked back next week, guaranteed.
The counterparty risk on those buildout contracts is not the same as their equity investments. Amazon isn’t assuming the entirety of that buildout exposure as a vote of confidence or form of investment in anthropic; they’re hedging it with insurance, credit default swaps, and MAE clauses.
Those datacenters are AWS infrastructure that Amazon owns and can repurpose. The equity stake is the only part that’s truly at risk, and $8B is a rounding error on Amazon’s balance sheet.