Anthropic's $224 Billion Cloud Bill Reveals the Real Winner of the AI Boom

In a few weeks, artificial intelligence (AI) lab Anthropic will head to the public stock market under the proposed ticker symbol: ANT. This will be a momentous occasion, as the closely held company expects to be valued at about $2 trillion, which would eclipse the $1.75 trillion record Space Exploration Technologies (NASDAQ: SPCX) set earlier this year.

Anthropic's recent S-1 document filed in anticipation of its initial public offering (IPO) reveals a lot about the company, but there is also some other noteworthy information in this document. Chief among them is how much other companies are benefiting from Anthropic's aggressive build-out plans. Two of the biggest beneficiaries of this are Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN) and Alphabet (NASDAQ: GOOG) (NASDAQ: GOOGL), as each of them is a significant computing provider for Anthropic. In fact, it has about $224 billion in cloud spending already planned with these two providers during the next decade.

That's a huge number, and it shows that the cloud computing providers may be the ultimate winners of the AI boom.

Image source: Getty Images.

Anthropic doesn't have access to its own computing power

Anthropic has literally started from nothing. In 2023, it had annual revenue of $41 million. That rose to $386 million in 2024, then $4.6 billion in 2025. For the first six months of this year, it has totaled $16.3 billion. That's exponential growth, and it has really left it no time to start building its own computing infrastructure. So, it chose to rent it.

This is a smart move, as it allowed Anthropic to scale quickly instead of having to wait for its own data centers to be constructed. With companies like Alphabet and Amazon having tons of capital to deploy to construct these data centers and operate a cloud computing unit, Anthropic needed to form close partnerships with them. It plans to stay close, as it is committed to spending about $114.5 billion with Google Cloud through 2033. But that's not all. Anthropic is using some of Alphabet's custom-designed computing chips, known as Tensor Processing Units (TPUs), and expects to make future payments of between $125 billion and $150 billion to gain access to them between 2028 and 2031. That's a ton of money with one provider, but it shows just how close their relationship is.

Amazon is another major partner but not to nearly the level that Alphabet is. Anthropic expects to pay it about $110 billion in computing usage through 2036. That brings the total to about $224 billion, not including the costs of acquiring Alphabet's TPUs.

Those are big figures for such a new company, but the growth that Anthropic is going through warrants it. But that's not the only way Google Cloud and Amazon Web Services (AWS) will benefit.

The cloud providers are also seeing independent growth

This is just what Anthropic is paying Alphabet and Amazon to train its AI model Claude and run models directly through its interface. However, users of Claude can also opt to deploy the model through various cloud computing providers, including AWS and Google Cloud. This means that clients of these platforms that want to deploy the Claude AI models and integrate them into their internal systems or a product also need to pay the cloud computing providers. Once again, these companies are using cloud providers because they don't have the necessary computing capacity themselves.

So, Alphabet and Amazon end up making money on both ends of the AI model. That's a great place to be in and will likely lead to substantial growth in the coming years. With cloud computing essentially being a subscription service, this will create a continuous revenue stream for Alphabet and Amazon, making them two of the biggest winners of the AI build-out.

Keithen Drury has positions in Alphabet and Amazon. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Alphabet and Amazon. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.