Anthropic Has Committed More Than $100 Billion to AWS, and Its Prospectus Could Reveal More Details About This Contract

Anthropic, the company behind the Claude artificial intelligence (AI) models, plans to publish its initial public offering (IPO) prospectus after Monday's Labor Day holiday, The Information reported late last month. A listing may follow as soon as late September or in October. Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN) shareholders have a more specific reason than most to open the document when it lands.

On April 20, Anthropic committed to spend "more than $100 billion over the next ten years" with Amazon Web Services (AWS), Amazon's cloud computing segment. That promise is equal to about a fifth of AWS's backlog of contracted work, which reached about $496 billion in June.

In other words, Amazon has already told investors how much one of its biggest cloud customers intends to spend. What no Amazon filing can show is whether the customer's own finances support it. That's what the prospectus is for.

Image source: Getty Images.

The contract is already in Amazon's filings

April's agreement covers up to 5 gigawatts of capacity on Amazon's own silicon -- Graviton processors and Trainium2 through Trainium4 AI chips, with an option on future generations.

Amazon's filings show what a deal that size does to the backlog. AWS's backlog (commitments in customer contracts with original terms longer than one year that haven't yet been recognized as revenue) had grown to about $496 billion by June 30. That was up from about $364 billion in March, and from $195 billion in the middle of 2025 -- growth of 154% year over year, including a $132 billion jump in a single quarter. And the Anthropic deal wasn't alone. The filing also discloses a $100 billion, eight-year expansion of AWS's existing $38 billion commitment from OpenAI, announced a quarter earlier.

Not only is AWS's contracted future far bigger than it was a year ago, but more of it also sits years away from becoming revenue. The weighted-average remaining life of the segment's long-term contracts stretched from 4.0 years to 6.4 years over those 12 months.

One half of the deal is easy to check

Of course, a backlog is signed work, not guaranteed revenue. Amazon says the amount and timing of what it recognizes "will be driven by customer usage and our performance in accordance with contractual obligations."

Amazon's half of that sentence looks strong. In the second quarter of 2026, AWS's revenue rose 37% year over year, to $42.2 billion -- the segment's fastest growth in 18 quarters and a $169 billion annualized pace. Segment operating income rose about 63% year over year to $16.6 billion. And the AI business inside AWS passed a $25 billion annualized revenue pace of its own, growing triple-digit percentages.

The customer's half is the part I can't verify yet. Anthropic is private, and its reported growth is extraordinary. In April, the company said its annualized revenue pace had passed $30 billion, more than triple its level entering the year. And by mid-August, CNBC reported, Anthropic was telling investors the pace had reached $65 billion by the end of July.

Spread evenly, the commitment works out to more than $10 billion a year, or about 6% of AWS's current annual revenue pace. That's arguably affordable if Anthropic's growth holds, and heavy if it doesn't.

And Amazon isn't just supplying the capacity. Its latest quarterly filing shows the company has put another $10 billion into Anthropic this year, with up to $15 billion more available under a financing arrangement tied to compute-delivery milestones. That means Amazon's interest in Anthropic's financial health goes beyond the contract itself.

What does a prospectus settle?

Nearly everything the market knows about Anthropic's finances today is reported, not filed. The company's only filing on record is the confidential draft it submitted to the Securities and Exchange Commission in June.

Its expected market value is a projection. People familiar with the matter told CNBC last month that the company could go public at a valuation of about $2 trillion, about double its private-market value. Its revenue pace is self-reported, and no audited numbers are public.

A prospectus replaces the estimates with audited financial statements: actual revenue, actual profit or losses, and actual cash. Even more useful for Amazon shareholders, it should carry Anthropic's own accounting of its purchase commitments, the other side of the agreements that swelled AWS's backlog.

At about $259 as of this writing, Amazon's stock trades at a forward price-to-earnings ratio of about 24. For a company whose cloud segment just accelerated to 37% growth, I think that's a reasonable price.

But AWS has now disclosed more than $200 billion of multi-year commitments from just two private AI companies, and until those companies file, investors can only judge them by reported figures.

Ultimately, Anthropic's prospectus is the first chance to check one of them. I'll be reading it closely.

Daniel Sparks and his clients do not have positions in any of the stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Amazon. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.