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It looks like Anthropic is the new OpenAI this year.
What we mean to say is Anthropic is the coolest, most exciting frontier model company so far in 2026.
Yes, Sam Altman may not agree to that. And there are probably half a dozen CEOs in the software industry that are still losing hair about what Anthropic might do next. But data shows Anthropic is the world’s largest (ARR-wise) & probably fastest-growing AI frontier model company at this point.
With the wind at its back, Anthropic is choosing to double down as quickly as it can to scale its capacity so that it can keep growing at exponential speed and win over more of the enterprise market.
And Amazon AMZN 0.00%↑, Anthropic’s largest investor, is answering to Anthropic’s rally cry. As part of Anthropic’s $100B pledge to Amazon, the hyperscaler is reciprocating by raising the stakes in its financial and compute commitment to Anthropic.
The $100B deal between Anthropic and Amazon is of significant consequence in our opinion, which not only alters the forward outlook for Amazon but also for the entire cohort of data center vendors that Amazon has partnered with to ship and deploy its army of Trainium and Graviton compute for customers like Anthropic.
In this post, we explain what the deal means for Amazon and its list of AI infrastructure vendors who benefit from this deal.
📌 Note, Amazon is currently our 2nd largest holding, a position we had been actively building a position at the end of 2025. Along with that, our positions in Astera Labs, Marvell, and Applied Optoelectronics, which are direct beneficiaries from the deal, has helped The TPO Portfolio deliver 15% returns since March 1 and 5.1% YTD, beating the S&P 500 and AIQ 💪.
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It’s starting to look like Anthropic is the gift that keeps on giving to Amazon, which is why the hyperscaler is raising the stakes in Anthropic. You can also see that in the YTD performance, where Amazon has been outperforming its hyperscaler peers.
Amazon’s expanded deal with Anthropic looks really shrewd and savvy, not only for the hyperscaler alone but also for its entire roster of AI infrastructure vendors. In our view, a lot of Andy Jassy’s strategic leadership and astute deal-making are really beginning to shine through, with AWS boss Matt Garman flanking his right and following through on the much-awaited AWS inflection.
With that said, let’s start with breaking down this $100B deal between Amazon and Anthropic and then move over to the economics of the deal and the winners from this deal in addition to Amazon. We’ll also be bolding out certain parts of the announcement because they will serve as assumptions for our updated outlook on Amazon and other key winners of the deal.
Anthropic’s deal to spend $100B on AWS compute is the frontier model company’s largest ever block commitment to secure compute.
Aside from that fact 👆, the top-line commitments of the deal are simple. Anthropic pledges to spend >$100B over the next 10 years on Amazon’s AWS compute capacity. Amazon reciprocates by investing $5B in Anthropic and delivering 5 GW of dedicated compute capacity to Anthropic. This is a brand new grid of compute capacity that Amazon will build and ship for Anthropic, which they will then use this capacity for “training and deploying Claude.”
💡Remember, Amazon already delivered half a million Trainium chips (equating to under 1 GW per our estimates) to Anthropic as part of Project Rainer, so this 5 GW capacity is incremental.
Within the scope of the $100B deal, Amazon is expected to deliver 1 GW worth of compute capacity in 2026 itself, and Amazon will deliver this compute capacity in the form of Trainium2 (T2) and Trainium3 (T3) XPUs this year. For this year, it’s just T2s & T3s XPUs that are planned to be incrementally deployed, but from next year, Amazon is expected to provide Anthropic with its Graviton CPU and all the next iterations of the Trainium XPUs (T4 and beyond).
With this deal, Anthropic doesn’t just secure “infrastructure at scale.” Anthropic has also secured “the option to purchase future generations of Amazon’s custom silicon as they become available.” That’s effectively putting Anthropic first in line for new chips as and when Amazon’s future iterations of Trainium and Graviton chips become available.
We said earlier how Amazon has been extremely savvy in its deal-making. Amazon is investing $5B into Anthropic as part of the deal, increasing its stake in the AI company to $13B. So Amazon still remains the largest investor in Anthropic. By the way, Amazon also reserves the right to invest an additional <$20B in Anthropic as part of the deal.
But here’s where the “savvy” part comes in. It’s not all “straight cash” that Amazon is pouring into Anthropic. Amazon is partly investing in Anthropic via its AWS compute credits, locking in the now largest AI model company in the world on its compute platform.
Amazon is known to use the open-source UALink as well as the hyperscaler’s own proprietary interconnect technology, NeuronLink, to deploy their compute. But, elsewhere, Amazon has been deepening its relationship with Nvidia NVDA 0.00%↑ further as well. Therefore, it looks like the upcoming iterations of Trainium will also use Nvidia’s NVLink Fusion protocol.
If you haven’t noticed already, Anthropic is primarily using this deal for “training and deploying” its models. At the same time, Amazon is going broad with its scale-up networking strategy by targeting all 3 scale-up interconnect technologies.
Essentially, Amazon is betting, in typical Amazon style, that its broad scale-up strategy will help it achieve mass reach and win newer customers with larger capex budgets to spend, and it is using its fastest horse in the stable (Anthropic) to showcase the might of its expanding Trainium/Graviton chips empire.
Here’s how this new $100B deal takes Amazon a few steps closer to the massive segment revenue goal Andy Jassy shared two weeks ago for its chips business.👇
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