Amazon is heading into its April 29 earnings report with investors focused on whether its cloud business can keep up the pace after a year of stronger sales and rising AI demand. KeyBanc analyst Justin Patterson said AWS is benefiting from capacity gains, AI diffusion and client expansion, and he argued that a 30% revenue growth rate for the quarter would likely be well received by the Street.
Patterson tied much of that optimism to Anthropic, calling it a long-standing AWS customer and saying its annual recurring revenue jumped from $9 billion in December 2025 to $30 billion in early April 2026. He said AWS accounts for about 60% of Anthropic spend, making the startup’s surge a meaningful tailwind for Amazon’s cloud division.
The numbers underline how much is riding on AWS. The unit generated $128.7 billion in revenue in 2025, up 20% from the year before, and Patterson said greater adoption of AI increases the likelihood of 30% year-over-year AWS growth in the first quarter, with further acceleration likely in 2026. Amazon stock has rallied 16% over the past month as traders have leaned into that view.
The Anthropic link cuts both ways. Amazon has invested $8 billion in the company since late 2023, and at the end of last year its total stake was valued at $60.6 billion, including $45.8 billion of convertible notes and $14.8 billion of nonvoting preferred stock. Anthropic announced a $30 billion capital raise in February that valued it at $380 billion, making it the third-highest valued private company according to Yahoo Finance data, and it has reportedly drawn investor interest at an $800 billion valuation recently.
Anthropic has also been moving fast on product. This month it released Claude Opus 4.7 and unveiled Claude Mythos, but restricted Mythos from public release because of national security risks. That kind of rapid rollout is part of the broader AI race Patterson said is helping AWS, even as the partnership raises questions about how much of Amazon’s cloud growth now depends on one of the buzziest model developers in the market.
There is another lever too. Patterson said Amazon CEO Andy Jassy seemed open-minded in the annual shareholder letter to selling Trainium chips to third parties, and Amazon’s chips business has already surpassed $20 billion in revenue through AWS, with more than triple-digit year-over-year growth. Dan Ives said he sees no cracks in AI demand on either the chips-and-hardware side or the software side, a view that matches the bullish mood around the stock heading into earnings. For Amazon, the test on April 29 is whether that enthusiasm shows up in the numbers, not just the share price.
