Amazon’s US$25bn Anthropic Deal Spurs Custom AI Chip Growth

In a company announcement, Anthropic states it plans to spend US$100bn on Amazon Web Services (AWS) over the next decade, securing up to 5 GW of new capacity to train and run its AI assistant Claude and develop current and future generations of Trainium, Amazon’s custom AI chips. The commitment represents one of the largest single deployments of custom AI accelerators in the industry, underscoring the technical demands of frontier model development.

“Anthropic’s commitment to run its large language models on AWS Trainium for the next decade reflects the progress we've made together on custom silicon, as we continue delivering the technology and infrastructure our customers need to build with generative AI,” Amazon CEO Andy Jassy says.

This move to invest huge amounts into AI reflects a market-wide shift in larger companies building AI-ready infrastructure to save costs, enhance customer experiences, improve employee productivity and streamline operations. AI spending across all industries has hit a record high since 2023, with worldwide AI spending estimated to reach US$2.5tn in 2026 according to Gartner.

Custom silicon drives infrastructure strategy

The partnership centres on Anthropic’s adoption of Amazon’s Trainium chips, purpose-built accelerators designed specifically for training and inference of large language models. Unlike general-purpose GPUs, custom AI chips offer optimised performance for specific workloads whilst potentially reducing power consumption and operational costs at scale. The decade-long commitment to Trainium suggests Anthropic sees technical advantages in Amazon’s silicon roadmap compared to alternatives from Nvidia, AMD or other chip manufacturers.

Amazon’s follows the company’s agreement to invest up to US$50bn in OpenAI, Anthropic’s main competitor. OpenAI has stated previously that it will in turn spend more than US$100bn on Amazon’s services. Both Anthropic and OpenAI have been racing to convince investors of their strong market position ahead of potential IPOs that could land as soon as this year.

Infrastructure constraints limit model deployment

In the company announcement, Anthropic says that enterprise and developer demand for Claude, as well as a “sharp rise in consumer usage,” has led to "inevitable strain” on its infrastructure, affecting the software’s reliability and performance. The technical challenges of scaling inference capacity for large language models have become a bottleneck across the industry.

“Our users tell us Claude is increasingly essential to how they work and we need to build the infrastructure to keep pace with rapidly growing demand,” Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei adds. “Our collaboration with Amazon will allow us to continue advancing AI research while delivering Claude to our customers, including the more than 100,000 building on AWS.”

Anthropic also states that this agreement will help expand its available capacity and will deliver "meaningful compute in the next three months and nearly 1 GW in total before the end of the year”The company’s capacity expansions are part of an effort to build the infrastructure needed to improve the Claude platform and reliably serve its self-reported base of 300,000 customers.

Multi-cloud strategy hedges technical dependencies

Anthropic is known for its family of Claude AI models and its early success in selling its software to larger enterprises like Amazon. Anthropic named AWS as its primary cloud provider in 2023 and its primary training partner in 2024, though the company has also made agreements with competing providers such as Microsoft and Google.

In November 2025, Microsoft agreed to invest up to US$5bn into Anthropic with the AI start up saying it was committed to purchasing US$30bn of Azure compute capacity. In March 2025, Anthropic also expanded its partnerships with Google and Broadcom for “multiple gigawatts” of capacity, according to a company press release.

Krishna Rao, CFO of Anthropic, discussed the deal in the same announcement, saying: “This ground-breaking partnership with Google and Broadcom is a continuation of our disciplined approach to scaling infrastructure. We are making our most significant compute commitment to date to keep pace with our unprecedented growth. We are building the capacity necessary to serve the exponential growth we have seen in our customer base while also enabling Claude to define the frontier of AI development.”