Anthropic's Eighty Billion Dollar Cloud Bill Reveals the Staggering Cost of Running Frontier AI

The Price Tag of Frontier AI

Anthropic, the company behind the Claude AI system, expects to pay at least eighty billion dollars to Amazon, Google, and Microsoft for cloud computing services through twenty twenty-nine, according to financial projections reported by The Information. The staggering figure underscores just how expensive it is to build and operate cutting-edge artificial intelligence at scale.

A Multi-Cloud Giant

What makes Anthropic unique in the AI landscape is its presence across all three major cloud platforms: Amazon Web Services' Bedrock, Google Cloud's Vertex AI, and Microsoft's Azure Foundry. No other frontier AI model holds that distinction, giving Anthropic a distribution advantage over rivals like OpenAI and Google's Gemini, which are each tied to single cloud ecosystems.

The company committed thirty billion dollars to Microsoft Azure in late twenty twenty-five, with plans for up to one gigawatt of compute capacity. It also expanded its Google Cloud arrangement to access up to one million tensor processing units in a deal worth tens of billions.

Record-Breaking Fundraising

The cloud spending projection comes days after Anthropic closed a thirty billion dollar Series G funding round led by Singapore's GIC and Coatue, pushing the company's valuation to three hundred and eighty billion dollars, more than double its previous valuation of one hundred and eighty-three billion dollars from late twenty twenty-five. The round is the second-largest venture funding deal of all time.

Building Its Own Infrastructure

Beyond renting cloud capacity, Anthropic has committed fifty billion dollars to build dedicated data centres across the United States with UK-based provider Fluidstack. The first sites in Texas and New York are expected to come online throughout twenty twenty-six, creating roughly eight hundred permanent jobs.

Revenue Growth

Anthropic's annual run-rate revenue has reached fourteen billion dollars, growing more than tenfold annually over the past three years. Amazon remains the company's primary cloud provider and largest investor, having contributed eight billion dollars. Historically, Anthropic's cloud spending has at times exceeded its revenue, highlighting the capital-intensive nature of frontier AI development.