Here's a fun thought experiment: what happens when an artificial intelligence startup starts generating revenue at a pace that would make most Fortune 500 companies blush? If you're Amazon.com Inc. (AMZN), you might start counting the potential upside for your cloud computing division.
That's essentially the story unfolding with AI firm Anthropic, whose rapid scaling is catching the eye of Wall Street analysts—and pointing to what could be a significant financial boost for Amazon Web Services (AWS).
Bank of America Sees a Clear Path for Amazon
In a new research note, Bank of America Securities analyst Justin Post reiterated his Buy rating on Amazon and maintained a $275 price target. His thesis is straightforward: accelerating enterprise demand for AI services, exemplified by Anthropic's growth, is a direct positive for AWS.
Post argues that Anthropic's success isn't just a flashy headline; it's a concrete signal of strong adoption of AI tools by businesses. And where does much of the computational heavy lifting for these tools happen? In the cloud, on platforms like AWS.
Anthropic's Numbers Are Staggering
Let's talk about scale. According to a Bloomberg report, Anthropic's annualized revenue run rate has now exceeded $19 billion. To put that in perspective, that's up $17 billion from a year ago and $10 billion since just the end of 2025. The company's ARR (annual recurring revenue) leapt from $9 billion in December to $19 billion by March, implying over $2.5 billion in quarter-over-quarter revenue growth.
What's driving this? Demand is surging for Anthropic's AI models and its developer tool, Claude Code. The launch of its more powerful Opus 4.6 model in early February gave adoption another jolt. It's not just businesses, either. Consumer interest is booming, with Claude's free active users up more than 60% and daily signups quadrupling since January.
The AWS Windfall Scenario
This is where it gets interesting for Amazon. If a meaningful portion of Anthropic's massive AI workloads runs on AWS, the financial impact could be substantial. Post crunched some numbers:
Anthropic projects it will spend about $12 billion on AI model-training costs in 2026. If AWS captures roughly half of that spending, it could drive up to a $1 billion quarter-over-quarter increase in AWS revenue from Anthropic alone in the first quarter. For context, that would exceed the analyst's overall quarter-over-quarter growth estimate of $900 million for all of AWS.
Then there are the revenue-sharing agreements. Anthropic expects to pay hyperscalers—the giant cloud providers—up to $6.4 billion in 2026 for reselling its Claude models. That's a huge jump from $1.9 billion in 2025. And Post notes that estimate could go even higher if demand keeps climbing.
The analyst connects the dots: Anthropic's soaring ARR, coupled with a new capacity agreement from another AI giant, OpenAI, highlights a rapidly expanding enterprise appetite for AI. This trend should directly support growth in AWS's backlog and accelerate its revenue.
Amazon Is Building for This Future
Amazon isn't just waiting for the business to roll in; it's preparing the infrastructure. The company plans to double AWS power capacity through 2027. Post believes this expansion could drive revenue above current Wall Street estimates for AWS in 2026 and 2027, all while improving returns on that capital spending. It's a bet that the AI boom has legs and that AWS will be a primary beneficiary.
In the market, Amazon shares were up 0.57% at $218.06 at the time of publication on Thursday.
