Want to Own Anthropic Stock But Can't? You Need to Buy Its AI Data Center Provider Instead.
Want to Own Anthropic Stock But Can't? You Need to Buy Its AI Data Center Provider Instead.
Brett Schafer, The Motley FoolFri, February 27, 2026 at 9:59 AM UTC
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Key Points -
Anthropic's massive revenue growth means more spending at Amazon's AWS.
AWS' revenue is already accelerating and should continue to grow for many years.
AWS' earnings power within a few years will help Amazon's overall earnings keep compounding.
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Step aside, OpenAI -- there is a new leading artificial intelligence (AI) disruptor nabbing all the headlines, and its name is Anthropic. The start-up focused on building AI tools for enterprises is experiencing massive revenue growth, raising boatloads of capital, and causing mayhem for stocks that are potentially at risk of disruption from its no-code software tools.
Anthropic just raised $30 billion in private funding and has plans to go public sometime this year. So it's impossible to directly invest in the business today. However, there is one way investors can get exposure to Anthropic's massive growth potential: through its main cloud computing partner, Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN).
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Massive revenue growth, more cloud spend
In January 2025, Anthropic's annualized revenue from its AI tools was $1 billion, an impressive figure for a company only a few years old, but not groundbreaking in the context of the entire software market.
Things have changed dramatically in the past year. Its annualized revenue was up to $14 billion as of January 2026, growing by more than a factor of 10 year over year. Software development teams are using tools such as Claude Code to reduce the time it takes to build a new product, thanks to the tool's ability to rapidly write software.
More revenue -- along with outside capital -- gives Anthropic even more capacity to train new AI models and run inference for existing customers. This means a massive increase in spending at its cloud computing partners, of which Amazon is the leader. Amazon is building a custom data center for Anthropic and is collaborating to build computer chips to both train and deploy AI models.
We are already seeing Amazon's cloud computing division -- Amazon Web Services (AWS) -- accelerate revenue growth, likely due to the partnership with Anthropic. AWS' revenue was up 24% year over year last quarter and reached $129 billion in sales in 2025.
A computer chip with the letters AI written on top of it.
Image source: Getty Images.
Should you buy Amazon because of Anthropic?
AWS is one of Amazon's largest, fastest-growing segments. If you are a believer in the growth story at Anthropic and its potential to keep compounding its revenue growth at this insane rate, then AWS may have plenty of room to grow further in the years to come.
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Assuming no further acceleration in revenue growth, AWS revenue growing by 24% year over year would lead to $250 billion in annual revenue five years from now. With fantastic profit margins of 35%, that would mean $86 billion in earnings from AWS alone over three years. That would be more than Amazon's entire operating income in 2025.
Continuation of the Anthropic growth story would mean massive gains for AWS and, likely, for Amazon shareholders as well.
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Brett Schafer has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Amazon. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.
Source: “AOL Money”
