Anthropic is expected to start trading on the Nasdaq under the ticker “ANT” on Thursday, Nov. 19. Its amended filing on Nov. 10 put the expected price of the 825 million shares between $70 and $78 each.
At the top of the range, the Claude maker could be worth up to around $1.4 trillion on a fully diluted basis. In May, it announced a funding round at a $965 billion valuation. And Bloomberg said on Nov. 12 that the offering had drawn about six times as many orders as there were shares available.
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Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN), meanwhile, trades near $267 as I write this, about 7% off its 52-week high. And with the stock at about 25 times its expected 2027 earnings, I think Amazon stock is a better way to get a piece of Anthropic’s growth than the initial public offering (IPO) itself.
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Anthropic pays Amazon either way
Amazon will hold over 5% of Anthropic’s outstanding shares after the offering, the filing says. But I’d argue the bigger link is the bill Anthropic pays Amazon.
In April, Anthropic agreed to spend at least $110 billion with Amazon between May 2026 and April 2036, no matter how much computing capacity it actually uses. If its spending falls short, it has to pay Amazon the difference.
The commitment covers computing capacity, which Amazon sells through Amazon Web Services (AWS), its cloud computing arm and its biggest source of profit. Showing how much demand AWS is handling, its revenue rose 39% year over year to $46.0 billion in the third quarter, speeding up from 37% in the second quarter. A year before, AWS grew 20%. Even more, AWS operating income climbed 55% to $17.8 billion. It was almost two-thirds of Amazon’s total operating income of $28.1 billion.
More than a cloud business
Amazon’s retail and advertising businesses come with that, of course. The company’s other two segments, North America and International, made a combined $10.3 billion in operating income in the third quarter.
Advertising took in $19.6 billion in sales for the quarter, up 12% year over year not counting currency changes. That was slower than 22% growth on the same basis a year before, and Amazon said timing around Prime Day hurt the quarter. But Amazon’s ad sales in the past four quarters were about $78 billion — more than double the revenue Anthropic brought in over the same stretch.
