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Amazon Will Pocket More From Anthropic’s IPO Than All VCs
Everyone is watching the venture capitalists. That is the wrong move. Amazon committed up to $4 billion into Anthropic and secured a deal making them Anthropic’s primary cloud provider. That second part is where the real money lives. At Anthropic’s current trajectory toward a public offering, Amazon’s total return could make the biggest VC gains look small.
Why This Moment Matters
Anthropic’s IPO is one of the most anticipated market events of 2026. The company behind Claude grew from a $4.1 billion valuation in 2023 to $61.5 billion by early 2025, according to Bloomberg. That’s a 15x jump in under two years. With enterprise AI spending accelerating, an IPO valuation well past $100 billion is a reasonable expectation from most analysts.
Every financial outlet is running the same story: Spark Capital, Google Ventures, and a handful of early backers are about to get very rich. According to Pitchbook, early Series A investors in Anthropic are sitting on paper gains of 30x or more depending on entry price. That sounds like the headline. It is not the real story.
The real story is the deal structure sitting underneath all those VC returns. And most people covering this IPO have not spent enough time on it.
The Amazon Angle Nobody Is Talking About
Here is what I keep telling people who ask about the Anthropic IPO: you can make 30x on a small early check, or you can make 10x on a $4 billion check. The math is not close.
Amazon committed up to $4 billion into Anthropic through a series of deals announced in 2023 and 2024, according to Amazon’s own press releases. But the equity stake is only part of the picture. As part of the deal, Anthropic agreed to use Amazon Web Services as its primary training and inference platform. According to industry analysts at Semianalysis, training large language models at the scale Anthropic operates costs hundreds of millions of dollars per year in compute alone.
That means every dollar Anthropic spends on AI development flows back to Amazon. Before the IPO even happens, Amazon is already collecting on this deal every quarter. The VCs are waiting for a liquidity event. Amazon is already printing revenue.
Think about this the way a real asset owner does. The VC who invested $50 million at a $500 million valuation will make a great return. But they’re sitting on paper gains. Amazon is collecting real cash from cloud contracts right now, and they hold equity that will grow at IPO. That is two income streams. The VCs have one.
According to data from Pitchbook, total venture investment in Anthropic across all rounds reached approximately $7 billion by mid-2025. Amazon’s portion represents a substantial chunk of that. But unlike every other investor, Amazon’s return is not purely tied to the IPO price. Even if the IPO underwhelms, Amazon still runs Anthropic’s compute. That is a hedge no VC in the deal has.
I have watched this pattern repeat in tech for 20 years. The company that controls the infrastructure always wins more than the investors. Microsoft did it with Office. AWS did it with the internet startup boom. Now they’re doing it with AI. The tools change. The structure does not.
For small operators watching from the sidelines, this is a useful model to study. Owning the picks and shovels during a gold rush beats owning shares in the miners. Right now, creators and small business owners can still get ahead of AI before the returns compress. Tools like InVideo AI let you build AI generated video content at a fraction of the cost of a traditional production team. That is the picks and shovels move for the individual operator: use AI to produce more output per dollar while the big players fight over IPO allocations.
What This Means For You
If you’re waiting to buy Anthropic at IPO, think carefully. IPOs at $100 billion plus valuations give retail investors almost no room to run. The VCs and Amazon are already sitting on massive gains. You would be buying at the top of their windfall, not the bottom of your opportunity.
Here is what I would actually do. Look at the companies that benefit from Anthropic’s growth without needing the IPO to pop. Amazon is the obvious one. AWS revenue grows every time an AI company signs a major cloud contract. Microsoft has a similar position with OpenAI. These are public companies you can buy today at valuations that still reflect upside.
For operators and small business owners, the more interesting play is cutting your cost base with AI tools right now, before these products get more expensive as their parent companies go public and face margin pressure. Platforms like AppSumo regularly surface lifetime deals on AI software that replace expensive recurring subscriptions. That is not investing. That is reducing your overhead while the big players fight over IPO valuations.
The wealth transfer from this AI cycle is already underway. Amazon positioned itself on the right side of it before most people knew what Anthropic was. Retail investors who show up at the IPO road show expecting a windfall will get mediocre returns instead. The deal was made in 2023. The profits were locked in then.
The Bottom Line
The VCs will make billions. Amazon will make more. The investors who show up at IPO will make the least of all three groups. This is how wealth works in tech: the money concentrates at the infrastructure layer, not the application layer. Amazon understood that years before the IPO. Most people will figure it out after the fact. By then the trade is already over.
Frequently Asked Questions
How much did Amazon invest in Anthropic?
Amazon committed up to $4 billion in Anthropic through a series of investments announced in 2023 and 2024, according to Amazon’s public press releases. As part of the agreement, Anthropic designated AWS as its primary cloud provider for training and running AI models, giving Amazon both equity exposure and ongoing cloud revenue from the deal.
When is Anthropic’s IPO expected?
Anthropic has not confirmed a specific IPO date. The company’s valuation reached $61.5 billion in early 2025, according to Bloomberg, and has continued to grow with the broader AI market. Most analysts expect a public offering in 2026 given the valuation trajectory and investor appetite for AI companies.
Will retail investors profit from Anthropic’s IPO?
Retail investors can typically buy shares at IPO price if their brokerage participates in the offering. However, companies at Anthropic’s expected valuation tend to price at levels where most of the early gains are already captured by pre-IPO investors. The better opportunity for most people may be in public companies that already benefit from Anthropic’s growth, particularly Amazon.
Why does Amazon benefit more than VCs from the Anthropic IPO?
Amazon holds both equity in Anthropic and a cloud contract that generates real revenue from Anthropic’s AI operations every quarter, according to the terms of their publicly announced partnership. VCs hold equity only. Amazon collects cloud revenue now regardless of the IPO outcome, giving them a built-in return that no other investor in the deal has.
What is the picks and shovels strategy for AI investing?
The picks and shovels strategy means focusing on the companies that provide infrastructure to the AI industry rather than betting on individual AI applications. Amazon, Microsoft, and Nvidia are the primary examples. They generate revenue from AI growth regardless of which specific AI company wins the market, which reduces the risk that comes with picking a single winner.
