Everyone is talking about the Anthropic IPO. The $965 billion valuation. The confidential S-1 filed on June 1st. The race between SpaceX, Anthropic, and OpenAI to reach public markets — what analysts at Wedbush Securities are already calling “an opening of the floodgates for the IPO market.”
Here’s what fewer people are saying out loud: the most compelling way to play this moment may already be publicly listed.
The Infrastructure Behind the Headline
Anthropic’s revenue trajectory is striking. The company announced its annualized run-rate crossed $47 billion in May 2026, up from roughly $10 billion at the end of 2025. That’s not a typo. And almost all of that compute infrastructure runs on Amazon Web Services.
In April, Amazon deepened its Anthropic commitment dramatically — agreeing to invest up to $25 billion in the AI company on top of the $8 billion it had already committed. As part of the expanded deal, Anthropic committed to spending more than $100 billion on AWS technologies over the next 10 years, securing up to 5 gigawatts of capacity to train and deploy its Claude models. More than 100,000 customers already run Claude on Amazon Bedrock.
That’s not a vendor relationship. That’s a structural dependency — and Amazon sits on the receiving end of it.
What the Numbers Actually Show
AWS grew 24% in Amazon’s most recent quarter — its fastest growth in 13 quarters, according to CEO Andy Jassy. Amazon’s advertising business grew 22%. The company has committed roughly $200 billion in capital expenditures across the business in 2026, the majority directed at AI infrastructure buildout.
Amazon has already deployed 2.1 million AI chips over the past 12 months, including more than a million Nvidia GPUs set to come online this year alongside its own Trainium line. The Trainium2 and Trainium3 ramp is accelerating directly on the back of Anthropic’s compute commitments.
This is where it gets interesting. The Anthropic-AWS deal isn’t a cloud discount arrangement — it’s structured with compute commitments tied to Anthropic’s model training and inference capacity needs. As Anthropic scales toward a public listing, its infrastructure spending flows through AWS. The more successful the IPO, the more Anthropic grows, the more revenue hits Amazon’s cloud segment.
The Indirect Exposure Angle
Most retail investors won’t get access to Anthropic at IPO pricing. Lock-up periods, institutional allocation priority, and post-IPO volatility make direct participation complicated. Amazon offers a different path — one with an existing business generating tens of billions in operating cash flow, a stake in Anthropic’s equity, and a $100 billion cloud commitment that compounds regardless of how the IPO trades on day one.
Alphabet holds a similar structural position through Google Cloud, which also serves as an Anthropic infrastructure partner. But the Amazon relationship is deeper — Anthropic has called AWS its “primary cloud provider” for training and inference, and the compute capacity secured under the April deal represents the operational backbone of Claude’s next growth phase.
The Risk Side of This
Amazon’s stock has already run more than 20% over the past month, and some analysts argue that Anthropic’s AI outcomes may now be fairly priced into the stock rather than offering a discount. AWS faces competitive pressure from both Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud as all three hyperscalers race to lock in AI workloads. And if AI capex spending hits turbulence — a risk Morningstar and Schwab strategists have both flagged for the second half of 2026 — the entire infrastructure trade could reprice quickly.
There’s also the question of Anthropic’s own trajectory post-IPO. The company is burning capital at a significant rate and operates in a competitive four-way race with OpenAI, Google DeepMind, and xAI. A stumble in model performance or enterprise adoption could dampen the cloud spending that flows back to AWS.
The Bigger Question
Three near-trillion-dollar AI companies are heading toward public markets in the same window — SpaceX, Anthropic, and OpenAI. The structural beneficiary of all three is the cloud and infrastructure layer underneath them. AWS sits squarely in that position.
The Anthropic IPO is a headline. The decade-long $100 billion cloud commitment tied to it is the story. That part is already public.
Full breakdown worth reviewing before the IPO window fully opens.
