Amazon shares climbed more than 4% on Thursday, making it one of the S&P 500’s top performers of the day, after artificial intelligence startup Anthropic secured a major funding round.
The e-commerce and cloud giant, which has invested heavily in Anthropic, is increasingly seen as poised to benefit from the startup’s rapid expansion and reliance on Amazon Web Services (AWS).
The stock has now gained over 6% year to date and has rebounded roughly 11% in the past month, supported by multiple catalysts.
Beyond Anthropic, Amazon is also expanding its same-day grocery delivery business and moving forward with its satellite internet initiative.
Still, analysts suggest that the most significant revenue opportunity lies in its deepening ties with Anthropic.
Anthropic’s growth and AWS advantage
Anthropic, which develops the Claude family of generative AI models, announced Tuesday that it closed a $13 billion funding round at a post-money valuation of $183 billion—nearly triple its worth in March.
Amazon’s total investment in the startup now stands at $8 billion, following its additional $4 billion commitment last November.
The startup primarily trains its Claude models on AWS infrastructure, utilizing Amazon’s in-house Trainium and Inferentia chips for training and inference workloads.
This integration provides Amazon with both a technology showcase and a growing revenue stream.
Barclays analyst Ross Sandler noted in a Thursday report that AWS could see a meaningful uplift from Anthropic by the fourth quarter, particularly if the startup begins pre-training its Claude 5 model during that time.
While Anthropic currently contributes about 100 basis points to AWS growth, Sandler projected that this could expand to as much as 400 basis points per quarter once both training and inference workloads scale.
Industry competition and strategic positioning
Anthropic is emerging as one of the strongest challengers to OpenAI, with Sandler highlighting the startup’s momentum in its application programming interface (API) business.
According to press reports cited by Barclays, Anthropic’s API business is now about double the size of OpenAI’s, bolstered by its paid services such as Claude Code, an AI-powered coding assistant.
Amazon’s close partnership ensures AWS remains central to Anthropic’s growth, though industry commentary has raised questions about performance issues tied to certain training projects, including T3 and Project Rainier.
Sandler suggested that as long as AWS retains Anthropic’s core training workloads, the cloud division should see accelerating growth.
Investor sentiment and market outlook
Amazon’s stock recovery since its second-quarter dip reflects growing confidence in the company’s AI-linked strategy.
Investors appear to be looking past short-term concerns to the longer-term opportunity that Anthropic represents.
If the startup continues to scale its training and inference activities on AWS, Amazon could secure a significant competitive advantage in cloud-based AI services.
Anthropic’s valuation surge—from the launch of its AI assistant Claude in March 2023 to its current $183 billion valuation—underscores investor appetite for advanced generative AI platforms.
For Amazon, the alignment between its cloud infrastructure and Anthropic’s growth could provide a durable revenue stream at a time when AI adoption is becoming a defining theme across technology markets.
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