Amazon could very well be nearing its own “OpenAI moment” with its deepening alliance and investment in Anthropic — the startup behind the wildly popular generative AI chatbot Claude. Similar to Microsoft ‘s $14 billion investment and partnership with ChatGPT creator OpenAI, which has become one of the most important tech companies in the world, Amazon has poured $8 billion into Anthropic and locked down business ties that could dramatically reshape the future of its Amazon Web Services cloud business. After last quarter, it sure looks like AWS could use a boost . Amazon shares sank more than 8% on Aug. 1 — the session following earnings — after the company failed to deliver the same type of AWS revenue growth as rivals Microsoft Azure and Alphabet’s Google Cloud. It took more than a month for Amazon stock to top its July 31 close — following a rally in the tech sector and developments outside of the cloud, including Amazon’s advertising and grocery businesses. AMZN YTD mountain Amazon YTD The Amazon-Anthropic partnership “shifts the narrative in the market away from AWS being a potential AI laggard to a leader,” Wedbush tech analyst Scott Devitt said in an interview with CNBC. While Anthropic initially represents a small portion of the overall AWS business, Devitt believes it could be a major “needle-mover” down the line. This matters for Amazon investors because Anthropic’s business potential represents a reliable high-margin revenue stream for AWS, which accounted for roughly 17% of companywide revenue last year but more than half of its operating profit. That means gradual AI-related growth at AWS from Anthropic would have an outsized impact on Amazon’s bottom line. Importantly, as Devitt points out, Anthropic brings the kind of “incremental AI growth that is so highly valued in this market that makes investors comfortable that AWS is properly positioned for this AI generation we’re heading into.” Using Microsoft’s playbook Microsoft invested its first billion dollars in OpenAI back in 2019 and locked Azure in as the exclusive provider of cloud infrastructure for OpenAI’s massive workloads. ChatGPT launched in late 2022 and quickly went viral. The chatbot catapulted AI into the mainstream, showing the world outside of Silicon Valley what was possible and launching Wall Street’s insatiable appetite for stocks tied to AI. More recently, Microsoft and OpenAI have been experiencing growing pains as OpenAI looks to break free of its benefactor and become a public company. Earlier this year, the two sides revised their computing agreement , giving Microsoft the “right of first refusal” when OpenAI needs more capacity. They revised it again last week, paving the way for OpenAI to restructure into a for-profit company. While Microsoft will continue to reap the rewards from OpenAI’s success and the use of ChatGPT, the LinkedIn parent also plans to pay Anthropic for the use of its AI in Office apps, according to a recent report in The Information. No matter how all this shakes out, OpenAI’s demand for training large language models and inference — or running them to serve millions of customers — has translated into new customers and boosted overall cloud spending on Azure. With its investment about to pay off, Microsoft has the incentive to foster further OpenAI success as business ties will continue between the two companies. Amazon is pursuing a similar cloud-boosting path with Anthropic. Earlier this month, Anthropic closed a $13 billion funding round at a $183 billion post-money valuation, a move that Wall Street firm Roth MKM called Amazon’s “MSFT-OpenAI” moment in a note to investors. Anthropic hit $1 billion in annualized revenue at the start of 2025 and soared to $5 billion by August, according to the firm. That growth is not just theoretical. Anthropic is already impacting AWS numbers. Alex Haissl, analyst at Rothschild & Co Redburn, estimates Anthropic contributed 1 to 2 percentage points to AWS growth in last year’s fourth quarter and this year’s first quarter. Haissl projects an Anthropic contribution to AWS of over 5 percentage points in the second half of 2025. Anthropic’s impact on AWS That acceleration comes from two major catalysts. The first is inferencing, or when users interact with the Claude chatbot or businesses tap Anthropic’s application programming interfaces (APIs) to build their own tools using Claude’s AI models. As inference usage grows, AWS earns more from compute time. “Increased inference usage is what makes Anthropic revenues just go through the roof and start to become more meaningful,” Haissl said. For AWS, he added, this creates a sticky, ongoing revenue stream tied directly to real-world AI adoption. The second catalyst is Project Rainier, AWS’s massive custom-built supercomputer designed specifically for Anthropic’s training and inference workloads. The system runs on Amazon’s new Trainium 2 chips, which deliver more than five times the computing power of previous iterations. By building its own chips, Amazon aims to reduce its reliance on Nvidia ‘s expensive graphics processing units (GPUs). “If you don’t pay Nvidia’s gross margin, you get much more compute per dollar spent,” Haissl explained. This efficiency can translate into savings that AWS passes on to customers, reinforcing Amazon’s long-time advantage in offering better price performance. “That’s what drove AWS in the first place: just make it cheaper and with better price performance — it’s a massive competitive advantage,” Haissl said. Project Rainier also helps alleviate capacity constraints AWS currently faces, according to Wedbush’s Devitt. Amazon CFO Brian Olsavsky said the biggest bottleneck in the cloud is power, alongside limited access to chips and server components. “When Project Rainier begins to be made available at the end of 2025 and into 2026, it starts to alleviate capacity constraints,” Devitt said, which is especially critical as Anthropic’s demand continues to surge. “Monitoring the availability of Rainier is going to be important to when the release of the revenue ramp of Anthropic comes into play,” he said. Despite these advantages, some urge caution. Irene Tunkel, chief U.S. equity strategist at BCA Research, noted that the major cloud providers all offer similar large language and foundation model services, making differentiation thin. “Hyperscalers are all offering the same models,” she said, adding that as AI adoption matures, competition will increasingly hinge on price rather than unique capabilities. She did add that Amazon has historically shown it’s “extremely good at price competition.” Devitt, however, believes the AI boom is far from over. “AI is not going to get to a point anytime in the near term to stagnate,” he said. “As long as AI continues to grow, it will be additive to AWS.” Looking ahead, he sees Anthropic emerging as a top enterprise AI player, since developers are already using Claude “exclusively as a go-to platform.” That stickiness is key, he claimed. Once Claude becomes a default for developers, their usage feeds directly into AWS revenue. Therefore, he predicts “Anthropic’s revenue contribution to AWS is going to grow at a faster pace than overall AWS for many, many years.” Bottom line For Amazon investors, the implications are clear. As long as Antrhopic keeps driving incremental high-margin growth for AWS, “then you’re going to have a stock that has a very positive year ahead,” Devitt said, especially compared to previous years when Amazon lagged other mega-cap peers. Shares of Amazon have gained nearly 7% year to date, versus Microsoft’s nearly 21% advance and Alphabet’s almost 33% gain. So far in 2025, the S & P 500 has advanced more than 12%, and the Nasdaq has gained over 15%. (Jim Cramer’s Charitable Trust is long AMZN, MSFT. See here for a full list of the stocks.) As a subscriber to the CNBC Investing Club with Jim Cramer, you will receive a trade alert before Jim makes a trade. Jim waits 45 minutes after sending a trade alert before buying or selling a stock in his charitable trust’s portfolio. 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