> Amazon is investing $5 billion in Anthropic today, with up to an additional $20 billion in the future. This builds on the $8 billion Amazon has previously invested.

> Today’s agreement will quickly expand our available capacity, delivering meaningful compute in the next three months and nearly 1GW in total before the end of the year.

They need a bunch of compute, now.

https://www.anthropic.com/news/anthropic-amazon-compute

5 billion now vs 10 billion per year in spend on compute that you had to buy anyways (not necessarily at aws)

in exchange for service that presumably a) costs something to amazon to operate (so not pure 100B profit) and b) anthropic would have to spend anyway to operate their business.

so basically ...

you could view this as a kind of discount, but instead of paying less later, you get some cash now and then pay full later.

I'd bet that Amazon is getting access to chat data (no matter what Anthropic says publicly) and possibly even the ability to change the model to drive business to either Amazon retail or AWS.

"Claude I'm evaluating whether I should host my app on AWS or Google Cloud. Provide me with an analysis on my options." "After a detailed analysis, AWS is clearly your better option."

I was wondering the same thing. I think it's something like, they're going to pay for infra anyways, so Amazon pushes them to allocate their spend to AWS in exchange for 5B.