Anthropic expects to pay Amazon (AMZN), Alphabet’s (GOOG) (GOOGL) Google, and Microsoft (MSFT) at least $80B to run its Claude AI on their cloud servers through 2029. However, that is not the only way the companies can make money from Anthropic, The Information reported.
These companies get a portion of the revenue Anthropic generates if their customers buy its AI, according to the company’s most recent forecasts, as per the report.
This is a fast-growing source of revenue. Anthropic paid about $1.3M in 2024 to cloud providers as their share of AI sales, according to the company’s disclosures. However, the amount was expected to increase to about $360M last year, $1.9 billion in 2026, and $6.4B in 2027, according to news outlet’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 report noted.
Anthropic, Amazon, Google, and Microsoft did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Seeking Alpha.
The revenue share provides some insight into how Anthropic incentivizes its cloud partners to offer its AI to their customers so that they work on its behalf. Microsoft, for example, has encouraged salespeople in its Azure cloud unit to sell Anthropic AI models, informing them that those sales will count toward their quotas just as Microsoft-made software and OpenAI’s models do, the report noted.
The estimated payouts, also called revenue sharing or partner profit share, are meaningful to Anthropic. They amount to about one-tenth of its overall forecasted revenue for those years, the report added, citing the company’s past financial disclosures.
By another measure, around 50% of Anthropic’s gross profits on selling its AI through Amazon has gone to Amazon, the report noted, citing a person with knowledge of 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.
This percentage could change if other aspects of the companies’ relationship change — for example, if Anthropic buys more cloud computing power from Amazon, the report added, citing a third person familiar with 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,” said the spokesperson. “This partnership continues to flourish as we work together to push the boundaries in AI.”
Google usually takes a share between 20% and 30% of net revenue, after subtracting infrastructure costs, from resale of its partners’ software, the report added, citing a Google employee familiar with the arrangement. It’s not clear how much it gets from reselling Anthropic’s AI.
The report added that it could not be known what part of gross profits or revenue Anthropic shares with Microsoft, which became a cloud provider for Anthropic in November and pledged to invest $5B in the company.
Anthropic’s executives have said that having collaborations with all three cloud companies gives it an advantage over OpenAI (OPENAI), which resells its AI through Microsoft as well as directly to its customers, because those cloud providers can provide its models to their business customers, the report noted.
For the cloud providers, Anthropic and OpenAI represent key AI customers that may 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 $18B in 2026 — from selling its AI directly to customers rather than via the cloud providers, according to the news outlet’s analysis of its financial forecasts.
To run the AI sold directly to customers, Anthropic mostly uses AWS. However, 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, the report noted.
Competitor OpenAI also shares a part of its sales with Microsoft. OpenAI pays 20% of its total revenue to Microsoft, but under the terms of a 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, the report added, citing a person familiar with the deal. The company expects to pay over $13B in total in revenue share, mainly to Microsoft, in 2026 and next year, according to the report.
Anthropic’s and OpenAI’s payouts follow a tradition of cloud providers earning a commission when they resell other companies’ products. Microsoft, for example, gets a payment when people purchase Databricks software over its Azure cloud, the report added.
The cloud providers make money off Anthropic in other ways. In addition to the $80B it pays them to run its models, Anthropic pays them for the cost of training its models. The company expects that expense to reach up to $100B through 2029, according to the report.
Besides using Nvidia chips, Anthropic also depends on Amazon’s AWS’ Trainium and Google’s tensor processing unit, or TPU, chips.
As of late last year, Anthropic halted breaking out how much it shares with cloud partners that resell its AI in some of its financial disclosures, instead combining that figure with other sales and marketing expenses, the report noted.
Anthropic expects sales and marketing expenses to increase up to $2.8B this year and $9B in 2027, according to the company’s winter forecast. The payouts to its resale partners are expected to be $1.9B this year and $6.4B in 2027. In the summer, Anthropic forecast the payouts for AI resales would be $1.6B in 2026 and about $4.4B in 2027, the report added.