Artificial intelligence startup Anthropic is expected to pay at least $80 billion to Amazon.com (AMZN.US), Alphabet (GOOGL.US), and Microsoft (MSFT.US) by 2029 for operating its Claude AI model on their cloud platforms. However, this is not the only way these cloud providers will profit from Anthropic. According to Anthropic's latest financial projections, the cloud service providers will also receive a share of revenue from Anthropic's AI sales. When enterprise customers purchase Anthropic's AI products through these cloud platforms, the cloud providers will earn a percentage of the sales. This revenue stream is growing rapidly: while Anthropic paid cloud providers only about $1.3 million in AI sales sharing in 2024, this amount is projected to jump to approximately $360 million in 2025, and further expand to $1.9 billion and $6.4 billion in 2026 and 2027, respectively. This sharing mechanism is seen as a key incentive for Anthropic to motivate its cloud partners. For example, Microsoft has encouraged its Azure cloud sales teams to promote Anthropic's models and includes such sales in performance evaluations. Analysts suggest that these sharing payments will account for about one-tenth of Anthropic's projected total revenue in the coming years, indicating a significant financial impact. Additionally, in AI resale business through Amazon Web Services (AWS), Anthropic must share roughly 50% of its gross profit with Amazon. This percentage may be adjusted in the future as cloud computing procurement scales change. Anthropic's management believes that collaborating with all three major cloud providers gives it a competitive advantage over OpenAI in reaching enterprise customers. In terms of computing investment, Anthropic estimates that by 2029, spending on model training alone could reach as high as $100 billion, highlighting the increasingly substantial cloud computing and chip costs behind generative AI.