What a $10,000 Investment in Amazon Now Would Be Worth if Its Anthropic Stake Gets Marked at $2 Trillion

Wall Street is already treating an Anthropic IPO as more than just a rumor. Reports are floating a $2 trillion listing as early as October, following the filing of a confidential S-1 earlier this summer.

In May, Anthropic told the public its annualized revenue run rate had cleared $47 billion. The company subsequently said its ARR reached $65 billion in July. At a $2 trillion market cap, that represents nearly 31 times the July ARR figure. Moreover, an offering of this size would surpass Space Exploration Technologies' IPO, which was listed at around $1.8 trillion in June, as the biggest IPO ever.

With this amount of money on the table, it's no wonder a recent Motley Fool survey found that 70% of investors are considering buying the IPO of either Anthropic or its closest rival, OpenAI.

You may not realize it, but Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN) has quietly become one of Anthropic's most important backers throughout the artificial intelligence (AI) revolution. Let's dig into Amazon's stake in Anthropic and assess what it could be worth and what that means for investors mulling over the IPO opportunity.

Image source: Getty Images.

How Amazon became a major owner of Anthropic

In September 2023, Amazon Web Services (AWS) forged a strategic partnership with Anthropic. As part of the deal, AWS became the primary platform for training and serving Anthropic's generative model, Claude. At that time, Amazon invested $1.25 billion into Anthropic as part of a broader $4 billion commitment. In March 2024, Amazon completed the remaining $2.75 billion tranche -- finishing its first full package in Anthropic. By that time, Claude had moved on to Amazon Bedrock, and the two companies began exploring custom silicon as a joint project.

Amazon's second act arrived in November 2024, when it invested another $4 billion. Although the e-commerce and cloud computing giant did not publish a specific valuation for Anthropic during this funding, private markets estimated the start-up was worth around $40 billion.

Following Amazon's second $4 billion commitment, Anthropic's valuation profile became much more public. By March 2025, the company was valued at $61.5 billion and later climbed to $183 billion by September of that year. Earlier this year, Anthropic was valued at $380 billion after raising a Series G round. Following this funding round, the unicorn raised $65 billion in Series H funding at a post-money valuation of $965 billion.

It's worth noting that prior to the Series H, Amazon invested $5 billion in Anthropic and left the door open for an additional $20 billion, contingent on meeting commercial milestones. In return, Anthropic pledged more than $100 billion of AWS spend over 10 years and up to 5 gigawatts of capacity.

Despite all of these public details, Amazon still does not publish its official ownership percentage in Anthropic. The best working estimate is to use Amazon's filings. As of June 30, Amazon carried the position at $190.4 billion -- split between $97.9 billion in convertible notes and $92.5 billion of nonvoting preferred stock. Against a $965 billion valuation, that implies roughly 19.7% ownership. Of course, this figure should be treated as an estimate until Anthropic's S-1 is publicly available and the prospectus provides a detailed cap table.

What a $2 trillion Anthropic IPO would mean for Amazon

Simple math tells us that a 19.7% slice of a $2 trillion company is worth about $394 billion. This represents roughly a 30 times multiple of Amazon's investment before accounting for the additional $20 billion it might still write.

Per its filings, Amazon has already marked the Anthropic position far above its cost basis. This means a $2 trillion IPO price would not create nearly $400 billion of brand-new unrealized accounting gains in one sweep. Rather, it would simply reprice the gap between today's $190 billion carrying value and a public-market mark value near $400 billion.

The implication here is not that Amazon got lucky on a venture moonshot. The company did something incredibly savvy. It bought a flagship cloud customer, a case study for its in-house Trainium and Inferentia chips, and secured a call option on the model layer of generative AI all at the same time. Anthropic's commitment to spend $100 billion on AWS is the quiet half of the trade, while Amazon's equity upside is the much louder half.

Should Amazon investors care about Anthropic?

Investors should care about Amazon's tie-up with Anthropic because the value of the relationship is no longer a rounding error. The real questions are how much of a $2 trillion Anthropic is already baked into Amazon's price, and how much still has to show up. That is where my $10,000 investment example comes into play.

Amazon's market capitalization is currently $2.8 trillion. A $394 billion Anthropic stake represents roughly 14% of that value -- or $0.14 of every dollar in Amazon. If you put $10,000 into Amazon stock today and the market fully counted the Anthropic stake, about $1,430 of your position would be considered Anthropic.

Remember, Amazon already carries its Anthropic investment at $190 billion. That is about $0.07 of every Amazon dollar. The reported IPO valuation of $2 trillion represents a step-up from $190 billion to $394 billion, a gap of about $204 billion. That gap translates to the other 7% of Amazon's total value.

That means if investors added Anthropic dollar-for-dollar, the $10,000 would pick up about $740. This is all to say that a successful listing could add a few hundred dollars of look-through value to a modest Amazon position already sitting on and benefiting from Anthropic.

Adam Spatacco has positions in Amazon. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Amazon. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.