Anthropic plans to spend $200 billion on Google Cloud, with two AI startups supporting half of the backlog orders for the four major cloud providers.

According to Beating Monitoring, exclusively disclosed by The Information, the 5GW computing power agreement between Anthropic and Google reached last month comes with a huge bill: over the next five years, Anthropic plans to spend about $200 billion on Google Cloud. This contract accounts for more than 40% of the $460 billion-plus revenue backlog that Google disclosed to investors last week—revenue backlog refers to signed contracts that have not yet been recognized as revenue.

Even more astonishing is the global figure. Combined, the contracts of OpenAI and Anthropic account for about half of the roughly $2 trillion revenue backlog of the four major U.S. cloud providers—Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and Oracle. During the AI boom, the core infrastructure revenue is still highly concentrated in two startups that are still burning money.

In detail: Amazon signed a $100 billion, 10-year contract with Anthropic in April. In the same quarter, OpenAI added a $100 billion commitment on AWS, accounting for more than 80% of the incremental increase in AWS’s revenue backlog. OpenAI expects its server spending this year to be about $45 billion, up from about $17 billion last year. Anthropic expected at the end of last year that its spending this year would exceed $20 billion, but after a surge in Q1 revenue, the actual figure could be higher.

Both companies’ forecasts are based on one premise: revenue in 2029 needs to reach 20 to 30 times that of 2025. After Oracle announced its $300 billion contract with OpenAI in September last year, its stock has fallen 45%, and investors worry about whether these expenditures can be realized. Google has a buffer: it supplies Anthropic with computing power using its own AI chips, which have higher profit margins than renting Nvidia GPUs.