Credit: Amazon | AWS

Amazon has significantly boosted its multibillion-dollar bet on Claude developer Anthropic by investing an additional $5 billion—enabling Anthropic to eventually secure up to 5 gigawatts’ worth of AI chips from Amazon to help train and run its popular Claude AI models.

Amazon is already one of Anthropic’s largest investors, having previously invested $8 billion in the AI startup. The latest move brings Amazon’s immediate investment up to $13 billion, and the companies have agreed to the possibility of Amazon committing another $20 billion in the future if the partnership achieves certain commercial milestones, according to Wall Street Journal reporting.

The large cash infusion and prospect of obtaining more computing resources come at a crucial time for Anthropic, given the massive surge in paid subscriptions for Claude-related services early this year. That demand spike and strain on the existing cloud compute infrastructure supporting Claude have contributed to performance issues and even occasional outages for thousands of Claude users.

“Growth at this pace places an inevitable strain on our infrastructure; our unprecedented consumer growth, in particular, has impacted reliability and performance for free, Pro, Max, and Team users, especially during peak hours,” Anthropic wrote in an announcement about the Amazon investment.

The new deal with Amazon will deliver “meaningful compute in the next three months” and nearly 1 gigawatt in total before the end of 2026, said Anthropic. The company did not specify the timeframe for when Anthropic might secure the full 5 gigawatts of new compute capacity from Amazon.

However, the agreement covers Amazon’s Graviton chips and multiple generations of the company’s Trainium2 through Trainium4 chips. The latter are Amazon’s AI chips designed for use in data centers to train the largest AI models.

“Our custom AI silicon offers high performance at significantly lower cost for customers, which is why it’s in such hot demand,” said Andy Jassey, CEO of Amazon, in a statement accompanying Amazon’s announcement.

Such an agreement is also the latest example of circular financing during the AI boom—the practice of tech companies investing in AI startups to help the latter buy products or services from the original investors. In this case, Amazon is giving Anthropic more money that it can use to purchase more AI chips and cloud computing resources from Amazon. The latest deal includes Anthropic committing more than $100 billion over the next decade to Amazon Web Services (AWS) technologies, including the current and future generations of Amazon’s custom silicon chips.

This is not the only circular financing deal for Anthropic involving some of the largest tech companies. The AI startup has also purchased AI chips and cloud services from Google, Nvidia, and Microsoft after receiving multibillion-dollar investments from them—part of a multicloud strategy that allows Anthropic to access a wide range of the latest AI hardware.