Anthropic IPO Could Boost Amazon and Alphabet

Amazon’s position looks especially powerful. The company has invested $18 billion in Anthropic, with another $15 billion tied to milestones, and said at the end of the second quarter that its stake was worth $190.4 billion when Anthropic carried a $965 billion valuation. That implied stake of roughly 20% could translate into a massive gain if the company lists anywhere near the latest reported private valuation. Alphabet, meanwhile, has put in $13.3 billion, with another $30 billion in conditional commitments, and disclosed $124.3 billion of non-public equity securities at quarter-end. Anthropic likely makes up the bulk of that, suggesting Alphabet owns close to 13%.

For investors, the appeal is not just paper gains. Anthropic’s public debut would give it a liquid currency to keep spending aggressively on compute, and that spending flows straight to Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud. According to reporting cited in the context, Anthropic has committed to $517 billion of compute deals over the past 11 months. In April, it agreed to spend more than $100 billion over the next decade with AWS to train and run Claude, using Amazon’s Trainium chips and Graviton CPUs. Alphabet secured $200 billion in Google Cloud commitments over five years, likely covering cloud services and chip sales tied to its TPU partnership with Anthropic and Broadcom.

That makes the IPO less of an exit than a flywheel. Anthropic is growing fast enough to support it, with reported second-quarter revenue jumping 14-fold year over year to $11.5 billion, more than double first-quarter revenue. It also reportedly posted adjusted gross margins above 80% before cloud partner cuts and model-training costs, along with an adjusted operating profit. Those are the kinds of numbers that can keep private-market valuations elevated — and keep public-market investors interested once the stock starts trading.

The risk, of course, is that AI valuations are still being tested. Anthropic’s IPO was reportedly delayed until November as safety concerns and rising competition from OpenAI and lower-cost rivals weigh on the market. But for long-term investors in Alphabet and Amazon, the bigger picture is hard to miss: both companies are turning their balance sheets and cloud platforms into indispensable picks-and-shovels exposure to frontier AI. If Anthropic keeps scaling, they do not just win once at the IPO. They keep getting paid every time Claude needs more compute.

For investors thinking in years, not weeks, that is exactly the kind of compounding setup worth watching.