Amazon's AWS could gain in 4Q if it retains Anthropic, says Barclays

Investing.com -- Amazon could see a re-acceleration in growth at AWS in the fourth quarter if it maintains its relationship with AI start-up Anthropic, Barclays analysts said.

Shares have recovered since a second-quarter dip on expectations of renewed AWS growth.

Barclays said the acceleration “assumes the bulk of Anthropic training continues on AWS,” noting that the AI start-up currently adds roughly 100 basis points to AWS growth in 2Q25, but that contribution “might ramp up to as much as 400bps per quarter once Claude 5 training and the existing inference revenues are both flowing.”

Anthropic’s API business is expected to generate around $1.6 billion in inference revenue for AWS in 2025, as the start-up’s ARR grows from $1 billion to $9 billion.

Barclays highlighted that this growth “assumes that Anthropic hangs on to most of the AI IDE revenue flowing through its API business,” warning that recent developments, such as Cursor switching its default to OpenAI’s GPT-5 API, “may challenge the sustainability of this revenue stream.”

The note also flagged early signs of tension between AWS and Anthropic.

“There have been some grumblings in the industry around accessing Anthropic models through AWS Bedrock, a sign that the AWS/Anthropic relationship could be fraying somewhat,” Barclays said.

Analysts added that a few large AI labs, including OpenAI and Anthropic, “are generating the bulk of AI revenue for the hyperscalers today,” and noted that broader AI deployment has yet to materialize this year.

The firm concluded that AWS’s growth trajectory in 4Q will likely hinge on its ability to retain key AI workloads and maintain strong collaboration with Anthropic.

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