Anthropic Could Share Up to $6.4 Billion With Amazon, Google and Microsoft in 2027
The Takeaway
- Anthropic rewards cloud partners that resell its AI with a share of sales
- Those payouts could reach an estimated $6.4 billion next year
- The resale fees are in addition to costs Anthropic pays to run and train its models
Anthropic expects to pay Amazon, Google and Microsoft at least $80 billion to run its Claude AI on their cloud servers through 2029, according to the startup’s most optimistic recent forecasts. That’s not the only way the tech giants can make money from Anthropic: They get a cut of the revenue Anthropic generates if their customers buy its AI.
And that’s a fast-growing source of revenue. Anthropic paid only about $1.3 million in 2024 to cloud providers as their cut of AI sales, according to the company’s disclosures. But that amount was expected to rise to about $360 million last year, $1.9 billion this year and $6.4 billion next year, according to The Information’s analysis of Anthropic’s most optimistic forecasts for sales and marketing expenses—which include the cloud provider payouts—and its past such payments.
The payouts give some insight into how Anthropic incentivizes its cloud partners to pitch its AI to their customers, so that they work on its behalf. Microsoft, for instance, has encouraged salespeople in its Azure cloud unit to sell Anthropic AI models, telling them those sales will count toward their quotas just as Microsoft-made software and OpenAI’s models do.
The estimated payouts, also known as revenue sharing or partner profit share, are meaningful to Anthropic. They amount to roughly one-tenth of its overall projected revenue for those years, according to the company’s past financial disclosures.
By another measure, about 50% of Anthropic’s gross profits on selling its AI via Amazon has gone to Amazon, according to a person familiar with those resales and another person who communicated with Anthropic executives. These gross profits represent the revenue Anthropic generates from selling AI on Amazon, after it pays to run that AI on Amazon’s cloud servers.
That percentage could change if other aspects of the pair’s relationship change: for instance, if Anthropic purchases more cloud computing power from Amazon, according to a third person with knowledge of the arrangement.
A spokesperson for Amazon Web Services declined to comment on the gross profits figure. “AWS and Anthropic have forged a differentiated partnership where we serve as Anthropic’s primary cloud provider and primary training partner,” the spokesperson said. “This partnership continues to flourish as we work together to push the boundaries in AI.”
Google typically takes a cut of somewhere between 20% and 30% of net revenue, after subtracting infrastructure costs, from resale of its partners’ software, according to a Google employee with knowledge of the arrangement. It’s not clear how much it gets from reselling Anthropic’s AI.
It couldn’t be learned what portion of gross profits or revenue Anthropic shares with Microsoft, which became a cloud provider for Anthropic in November and committed to investing $5 billion in the company.
Anthropic’s executives have said that having partnerships with all three cloud companies gives it an advantage over OpenAI, which resells its AI through Microsoft as well as directly to its customers, because those cloud providers can offer its models to their many business customers, according to a person familiar with the matter.
Cloud Clients
For the cloud providers, Anthropic and OpenAI represent marquee AI customers that could attract other AI startups to use their services—and more of Anthropic’s cloud business is up for grabs.
As of last summer, Anthropic was generating the majority of its revenue—which it recently forecast would total as much as $18 billion this year—from selling its AI directly to customers rather than through the cloud providers, according to The Information’s analysis of its financial projections.
To run the AI sold directly to customers, Anthropic mostly uses AWS, according to a person with knowledge of the arrangement. But Anthropic could eventually spread the costs of supporting AI it sells directly to customers, known as first-party sales, between the three cloud providers and their own data centers, according to the person who spoke to executives and the person with knowledge of the Amazon and Anthropic arrangement.
Rival OpenAI also shares a portion of its sales with longtime backer Microsoft.
OpenAI pays 20% of its total revenue to Microsoft, but under the terms of a recently renegotiated partnership, the payouts will be more heavily weighted toward the years leading up to 2032 so that the payouts don’t impact OpenAI’s cash flow as much, according to a person with knowledge of the deal. The company has projected paying more than $13 billion in total in revenue share, primarily to Microsoft, this year and next.
Anthropic’s and OpenAI’s payouts follow a tradition of cloud providers earning a commission when they resell other companies’ products. Microsoft, for instance, gets a payment when people buy Databricks software over its Azure cloud.
The cloud providers make money off Anthropic in other ways. In addition to the $80 billion it pays them to run its models, Anthropic pays them for the cost of training its models. The company expects that expense to total as much as $100 billion through 2029. As well as using Nvidia chips, Anthropic also relies on Amazon’s and Google’s chips—AWS Trainium and tensor processing units, respectively.
As of late last year, Anthropic stopped breaking out how much it shares with cloud partners that resell its AI in some of its financial disclosures, instead lumping that figure with other sales and marketing expenses, according to one of the people.
The company expects sales and marketing expenses to rise to as much as $2.8 billion this year and $9 billion next year, according to its winter forecasts. The payouts to its resale partners are expected to be $1.9 billion this year and $6.4 billion next year, according to The Information’s analysis of Anthropic’s most optimistic forecasts for sales and marketing expenses and how much AI resale payouts contributed to past sales and marketing costs.
In the summer, Anthropic projected the payouts for AI resales would be $1.6 billion this year and about $4.4 billion next year.