Exclusive: Here's How Much Anthropic Spends on AWS
Better Offline
Cool Zone Media and iHeartPodcasts
4.6 • 687 Ratings
🗓️ 20 October 2025
⏱️ 21 minutes
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Summary
In a Better Offline exclusive, Ed Zitron reveals how much Anthropic spent on Amazon Web Services in 2024 and 2025, and how the costs of running their services are increasing linearly with their revenue, suggesting there may be no path to profitability for LLMs.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is an I-Heart podcast. |
| 0:02.5 | Guaranteed human. |
| 0:06.6 | Quarzone Media. |
| 0:09.1 | Hello and welcome to a special exclusive episode of Better Offline. |
| 0:12.7 | I'm your host, Ed Zittron. |
| 0:30.6 | Better Offline. As a result of discussions with sources and documents viewed of the amounts build on Amazon Web Services, I am for the first time in history able to disclose how much AI firms are spending on AWS, |
| 0:35.6 | specifically Anthropic and AI coding company Cursor, |
| 0:38.9 | its largest customer for API services. I can exclusively reveal today how much Anthropics |
| 0:44.1 | spent on AWS for the years 24 and from the beginning of 2025 through the end of September |
| 0:49.0 | 2025. And from what I can see, the compute spend may vastly exceed what has previously been reported. |
| 0:55.6 | Furthermore, I can confirm that through the end of September 2025, Anthropics has spent around |
| 1:00.4 | 100% of their revenue in 2025 on Amazon Web Services, spending $2.66 billion on compute, |
| 1:06.7 | on an estimated $2.55 billion in revenue. Go to the newsletter. I saw the whole goddamn thing, and if I'm honest, this piece is the |
| 1:14.5 | culmination of several months of articles about how Anthropics business tactics have made |
| 1:18.8 | be turned the screws on their biggest customer. I can exclusively reveal today, as well as many |
| 1:24.1 | other numbers in the newsletter, the cursors' Amazon Web Services bills doubled from |
| 1:28.1 | $6.2 million in May 2025 to $12.6 million in June 2025, and have stayed inflated since Anthropic |
| 1:35.4 | increased the costs with the launch of priority service tiers, an aggressive rent-seeking measure. |
| 1:40.1 | I need to be clear, I cannot 100% guarantee that's what did it. I'm going to hedge my bets very hard on that. But it certainly bloody well seems that way. It's my gut instinct. I'm not going to say it declaratively, but I'm going to show you why I believe this. And I admit I struggled with how to turn this into an episode because the newsletter, which is on my free feed, is a series of numbers and analyses that if I just read them aloud would sound extremely dull and at times be quite hard to follow. |
| 2:03.6 | It's not something that naturally plays well for radio. |
| 2:06.6 | So instead of giving you the audible version, I'm going to give you the cliff notes and speak to a degree of vindication I feel on reading these costs. |
| 2:13.6 | So let's start with a number. |
... |
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