Amazon and Google stand to gain most from a planned Anthropic IPO

What the report says

As finance.technews.tw reported, Anthropic, the maker of Claude, is preparing a highly anticipated initial public offering (IPO), the first time its shares would be sold on a public market. Amazon and Google, both earlier investors, together hold more than 25%.

The outlet cites the New York Times, which says a successful IPO could value Anthropic at $1.4 trillion. On that basis, Amazon's investment of about eighteen billion dollars would be worth more than two hundred fifty billion. Google's roughly thirty-three billion would grow to about one hundred forty billion.

Cash in, cloud contracts attached

These were not plain financial bets. When Google first invested in 2023, Anthropic committed to training its models on Google's own TPU chips, which are processors Google designed for AI. When Amazon made its first commitment in September 2023, of about one and a quarter billion dollars, Anthropic named AWS, Amazon's cloud arm, its main cloud provider.

Anthropic's appetite for computing power pushed Amazon to speed up its own AI chips and build some of its largest data centers. Analyst Gil Luria of D.A. Davidson says each company has seen more than 1 trillion dollars of market value growth. He credits supplying cloud infrastructure and selling Anthropic's models to business customers.

How a fear of missing out built this

Anthropic's early money in 2021 came from Skype co-founder Jaan Tallinn and FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried. After FTX collapsed in late 2022, its future looked shaky. Within weeks OpenAI launched ChatGPT, and Anthropic became a prized asset.

Training top models takes enormous cash, and Nvidia's CEO Jensen Huang has said his company then could not afford to invest billions so Anthropic could use its computing. Amazon had been an early OpenAI donor but held back, while Microsoft put one billion dollars into OpenAI in 2019. Salesforce's Marc Benioff has said that Microsoft's deal kept Salesforce out of OpenAI, so it turned to Anthropic.

Hedging and the open question

The report says the big backers are not expected to cash out after the IPO. Google, Microsoft and others reportedly plan to buy more shares through a private placement at the same time. Luria argues the stakes give priority on computing supply and chip deals. Microsoft, mainly allied with OpenAI, would be hedging by joining.

The outlet's closing caution is the key one. Whether these investments turn into profit depends on whether real end-market demand for AI can support the enormous spending behind it.