Anthropic Plans to Spend $200 Billion on Google Cloud, Two AI Startups Account for Half of Big Four Cloud Providers' Backlog Orders

According to Dynamic Beat monitoring, The Information exclusively revealed that in a deal reached last month, Anthropic's 5GW computing power agreement with Google comes with a hefty bill: over the next 5 years, Anthropic plans to spend approximately $200 billion on Google Cloud. This contract accounts for over 40% of Google's revenue backlog of over $460 billion disclosed to investors last week.

Even more astonishing is the overall figure. When the contracts of OpenAI and Anthropic are combined, they represent half of the total revenue backlog of around $2 trillion for the four major US cloud providers - Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and Oracle. The most crucial infrastructure revenue in the AI boom remains highly concentrated on the two still money-burning startups.

Specifically: in April, Amazon signed a $100 billion, 10-year contract with Anthropic; in the same quarter, OpenAI added a $100 billion commitment on AWS, accounting for over 80% of AWS's backlog increment. OpenAI expects to spend around $45 billion on servers this year, up from about $17 billion last year; Anthropic forecasted by the end of last year to spend over $200 billion this year, but after a surge in Q1 revenue, the actual number may be even higher.

The forecasts of both companies are based on one premise: revenues in 2029 need to be 20 to 30 times those of 2025. After Oracle announced a $300 billion deal with OpenAI in September last year, its stock price dropped by 45%, with investors concerned about whether these expenditures can be met. Google has a buffer: it provides computing power to Anthropic using its in-house AI chips, which have a higher profit margin than renting NVIDIA GPUs.