According to The Information, Anthropic's 5GW compute deal with Google last month came with a staggering price tag: over the next five years, the AI startup plans to spend roughly $200 billion on Google Cloud. That single contract accounts for more than 40% of Google's $460+ billion revenue backlog (contracts signed but not yet recognized revenue) disclosed to investors last week.
Even more striking is the big picture. Combined, contracts from OpenAI and Anthropic make up about half of the roughly $2 trillion revenue backlog across the four major US cloud providers: Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and Oracle. The core infrastructure revenue from the AI boom remains heavily concentrated in two cash-burning startups.
Breaking it down: Amazon signed a $100 billion, 10-year contract with Anthropic in April; OpenAI added another $100 billion commitment to AWS in the same quarter, accounting for more than 80% of AWS's backlog increase. OpenAI expects to spend about $45 billion on servers this year, up from roughly $17 billion last year; Anthropic predicted late last year that it would spend over $20 billion in 2025, but that figure could be even higher after a revenue surge in Q1.
Both companies' forecasts rest on a bold assumption: their 2029 revenue must be 20 to 30 times their 2025 revenue. Oracle's stock has already fallen 45% since announcing a $300 billion contract with OpenAI last September, as investors worry whether those spending commitments can materialize. Google does have a cushion: it provides Anthropic with compute using its own AI chips, which offer higher margins than renting Nvidia GPUs.