Anthropic, an artificial intelligence start-up preparing for its initial public offering, has disclosed extensive future commitments that highlight significant counterparty risks for its major partners. The company’s prospectus reveals contracts and leases with a combined value approaching $1 trillion, dwarfing its reported sales of $16 billion in the first half of 2026. These obligations span numerous technology giants, including Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon, SpaceX, Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), and Broadcom, illustrating both Anthropic’s role as a critical customer and the substantial financial exposure of these counterparties.
Among the most complex relationships is Anthropic’s with Alphabet, which features as a distributor, competitor, and shareholder with over 5 percent ownership following multiple funding rounds. Alphabet’s commitments include a $15 billion Google Cloud contract and a pending agreement for Google’s tensor processing unit (TPU) chips estimated between $125 billion and $150 billion. Broadcom, which designs those chips alongside Google, is also a key supplier, charging Anthropic $16 billion to rent TPUs.
Amazon holds a tripartite role similar to Alphabet’s as distributor, competitor, and greater-than-5 percent shareholder, with a $110 billion cloud contract in place. Meanwhile, SpaceX’s contracts total $120 billion but include options for either party to exit starting early 2027. Microsoft’s commitments are comparatively smaller, at $45 billion, with similar-sized agreements with smaller cloud providers Nscale and Lambda. Additional large-scale equipment commitments include $20 billion for AMD’s Helios AI servers and significant investments involving Nvidia hardware.
Industry analysts warn that should Anthropic default on any of these contracts, the fallout could severely impact the stocks of its major partners and disrupt the AI infrastructure sector. These extensive contracts, along with similar deals from Anthropic’s main competitor, OpenAI, underpin the hundreds of billions of dollars being invested in AI data center expansion by Microsoft, Alphabet, and Amazon.
Recent quarterly earnings reports from these cloud giants reflect the centrality of AI partnerships to their business performance. Microsoft, reporting fiscal first-quarter results, posted a 48 percent rise in Azure cloud sales, driven in part by contributions from OpenAI—responsible for roughly 30 percent of Azure revenue and 11 percent of Microsoft’s total sales. Despite increasing depreciation costs, Azure’s operating margin remained steady at 53 percent. Microsoft’s strong cash flow enabled debt repayment and continued share buybacks, although it issued $25 billion in bonds, its first issuance since 2017, causing a modest 0.2 percent share decline.
Alphabet’s third-quarter earnings showed robust growth in Google Cloud, with sales doubling year over year and operating margins climbing from 24 percent to 36 percent, surpassing Wall Street expectations. However, Alphabet’s core advertising business underperformed, and soaring research and development expenses, alongside losses in its “other bets” segment, dampened overall results. Capital expenditures increased, eliminating the quarter’s record cash from operations and leading to the company’s third consecutive quarter with negative free cash flow. Alphabet’s stock declined 13 percent following the earnings announcement.
Amazon Web Services also exceeded expectations with strong sales and operating margins in its cloud division, but weaker retail segment results and cautious future guidance tempered enthusiasm. The company reported $7 billion in capital expenditures and a $35 billion negative free cash flow for the quarter, contributing to a $62 billion shortfall so far in 2026. Amazon reaffirmed its full-year capital expenditure guidance of $220 billion, anticipating a potential return to positive free cash flow in the upcoming holiday quarter.
The intertwined financial fates of these major cloud providers and AI start-ups such as Anthropic and OpenAI underscore the growing influence—and risks—associated with the rapidly expanding artificial intelligence sector.