Amazon is expected to post a strong quarter when it reports earnings on April 29, with Amazon Web Services likely getting a lift from AI demand and from its close ties to Anthropic. Analysts say the cloud unit could show faster growth as customers keep spending on artificial intelligence infrastructure and model training.
KeyBanc analyst Justin Patterson said AWS is benefiting from “capacity gains, AI diffusion, and client expansion,” and pointed to Anthropic as a major contributor. He noted that Anthropic has been a long-standing AWS customer and that its rapid growth in annual recurring revenue, from $9 billion in December 2025 to $30 billion in early April 2026, could create a meaningful tailwind for Amazon’s cloud business.
Anthropic’s growth is becoming important to AWS
Anthropic has spent the year expanding its model lineup, which likely increases its need for large-scale cloud computing. This month, the company released Claude Opus 4.7, which it described as its most advanced reasoning model so far.
It also introduced Claude Mythos, a “hyper-agentic” model that Anthropic has kept out of public release because of national security concerns. The pace of product development suggests the company is drawing heavily on AI compute resources, much of which runs through AWS.
That matters for Amazon because stronger Anthropic usage can support cloud revenue growth at a time when investors are watching whether AI spending is turning into measurable returns. Patterson said AWS could be about 60% of Anthropic’s spend, making the startup’s expansion especially relevant for Amazon’s results.
Wall Street is watching for an AWS acceleration
A 30% revenue growth rate for AWS in the quarter would likely be seen positively by investors. That would mark a clear improvement from 2025, when AWS generated $128.7 billion in revenue, up 20% from the prior year.
The market is also paying attention to broader AI demand, not just Anthropic. Patterson said rising AI adoption increases the odds of 30% year-over-year AWS growth in the first quarter, with further acceleration possible in 2026.
Recent results from Taiwan Semiconductor also supported that view, since strong chip demand often signals steady appetite for AI infrastructure. For Amazon, that demand could help cloud sales while also reinforcing the case that AI spending remains a core driver of enterprise technology budgets.
Amazon’s Anthropic stake could also matter
AWS is not the only place where Anthropic may help Amazon’s numbers. Amazon has invested $8 billion in Anthropic since late 2023, and its annual report showed holdings of $45.8 billion of convertible notes and $14.8 billion of nonvoting preferred stock at the end of last year.
That stake puts Amazon’s total exposure at a valuation of $60.6 billion, based on the figures in the filing. Anthropic’s own value has climbed sharply, after a $30 billion capital raise in February valued the company at $380 billion, making it the third-highest valued private company, according to Yahoo Finance data.
There have also been reports of investor interest at an even higher $800 billion valuation, underscoring how quickly interest in frontier AI companies has grown. For Amazon, that rising valuation could add another layer of finance-related upside to a quarter already shaped by cloud and AI demand.
More room for AWS growth beyond Anthropic
Patterson also pointed to another possible driver: Amazon’s own chips. He said CEO Andy Jassy appeared open-minded in the annual shareholder letter about selling Trainium chips to third parties.
He added that chips have already passed $20 billion in revenue through AWS, with more than triple-digit year-over-year growth, suggesting Amazon may still have another growth lever available. That combination of cloud demand, chip revenue, and Anthropic-related momentum could help Amazon deliver a stronger-than-expected report when it updates investors on April 29.
Read more at: finance.yahoo.com-
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