Amazon Is Quietly Powering Both Sides of the AI War

While OpenAI and Anthropic fight to build the best model, Amazon has positioned itself to win either way. Its cloud arm signed a 2-gigawatt deal to supply OpenAI and a 5-gigawatt deal with Anthropic, plus a 25 billion dollar investment in the latter. AWS is becoming the arms dealer of the AI war, selling shovels to everyone digging.

The strategy is to own the infrastructure, not pick the winner. Frontier labs need vast amounts of compute and power, and AWS is committing gigawatts of capacity and its own Trainium chips to supply them. By signing the two leading labs at once, Amazon makes money whether OpenAI or Anthropic ends up on top, because both run on its hardware either way. Neutrality is the product.

The OpenAI side marks a real shift. A revised deal stripped Microsoft of its exclusive access to OpenAI's technology, and OpenAI promptly announced exclusive AI products with Amazon instead. For years Microsoft was OpenAI's defining partner, so seeing OpenAI lean toward Amazon signals the labs want more than one cloud and more than one backer. The old exclusive pairings are loosening.

The Anthropic side is even deeper. Amazon's 25 billion dollar investment and 5-gigawatt supply deal tie it closely to the maker of Claude, the same company now racing toward a near-trillion-dollar IPO. That gives Amazon both a financial stake in Anthropic's rise and the contract to power it, a position that pays off twice if Anthropic succeeds. AWS is invested in the outcome and the infrastructure.

The risk is concentration of a different kind. If AI demand cools, Amazon has committed enormous capacity and capital to a handful of labs whose business models are still unproven, and gigawatts of data centers are expensive to build and idle. Powering both sides spreads the bet across the labs, but it doubles down on the AI boom itself. The wager is on the whole sector, not one name.

So the clearest way to profit from the AI race may be to sell the picks and shovels to everyone running it, and Amazon is doing exactly that. Gigawatts to OpenAI, gigawatts and billions to Anthropic, and a cut of whoever wins. The model war grabs attention, the infrastructure war pays the bills. Watch how much capacity AWS keeps committing.