Analysts: Anthropic deals create circular compute loop between Google and Amazon

Amazon and Google have both expanded their Anthropic deals this month, turning the Claude maker into a customer, partner and rival at once. (cnbc.com 1) (cnbc.com 2) Amazon said on April 20 it will invest up to another $25 billion in Anthropic, on top of the $8 billion it had already committed. Anthropic said it will spend more than $100 billion on Amazon Web Services over 10 years, including current and future Trainium chips. (cnbc.com) (usnews.com) Google said on April 24 it plans to invest up to $40 billion in Anthropic. The deal includes $10 billion now and as much as $30 billion later, tied to performance milestones, according to CNBC and Reuters. (cnbc.com) (usnews.com) That structure is why analysts describe a loop: the cloud giants fund Anthropic, and Anthropic turns around and buys enormous amounts of cloud compute from them. In artificial intelligence, compute is the rented factory floor where models are trained and run. (cnbc.com 1) (cnbc.com 2) Anthropic’s Amazon tie is the most explicit. In November 2024, Anthropic said Amazon’s new $4 billion investment would bring Amazon’s total stake to $8 billion and make AWS its primary cloud and training partner. (anthropic.com) (aboutamazon.com) Google’s side is older and broader. Google invested $300 million in Anthropic in April 2023, then committed up to $2 billion in October 2023, including $500 million upfront and $1.5 billion over time. (cnbc.com) By October 2025, Anthropic and Google had also announced a cloud deal worth tens of billions of dollars that gave Anthropic access to up to 1 million Google Tensor Processing Units, or TPUs. CNBC reported the arrangement would add more than a gigawatt of compute capacity by 2026. (cnbc.com) Anthropic has said its infrastructure is deliberately multi-cloud. CNBC reported in October 2025 that Claude workloads run across Google TPUs, Amazon Trainium chips and Nvidia graphics processors, with different systems handling training, inference and research. (cnbc.com) That means the contest is no longer only about whose chatbot scores higher on benchmarks. It is also about which company can lock in the chips, data centers and long-term contracts needed to keep a fast-growing model company supplied. (cnbc.com) (aboutamazon.com) Anthropic is taking money from two cloud giants that also sell competing artificial intelligence services. The result is a market where the same company can be a strategic investor, a critical supplier and a direct competitor at the same time. (usnews.com) (cnbc.com)