Amazon’s Quiet Crisis: What Anthropic’s Defection Could Mean for AWS

Amazon’s long-term AI ambitions are being tested as its $8 billion bet on Anthropic faces a potential turning point. Recent reports reveal that Anthropic, the AI startup behind the Claude language model and currently enjoying a $5 billion annualized revenue run rate, is in talks with Alphabet’s Google for a cloud-computing deal potentially worth tens of billions of dollars. This shift, if finalized, could grant Anthropic access to Google’s advanced AI chips, a key competitive asset as workloads grow increasingly complex. Though Amazon was named Anthropic’s primary cloud and training partner in late 2024, analysts now indicate that Google Cloud has emerged as the company’s primary GPU provider. The news hit Amazon stock, which fell 1.7% amid rising concerns about AWS’ positioning in AI compute. Amazon’s own Project Rainier and in-house Trainium chips were expected to support Anthropic’s future AI model training, but the startup’s apparent pivot toward Google hardware introduces uncertainty. Here are the key drivers shaping Amazon’s evolving position in this escalating AI cloud rivalry.