Alphabet and Amazon See Billions in Gains From Anthropic Investments

Alphabet Inc. and Amazon.com Inc. both impressed investors with stronger-than-expected third-quarter profits and they have their stakes in Anthropic PBC, the creator of the popular Claude chatbot, to thank for part of that boost.

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Alphabet reported $10.7 billion in net gains on equity securities, attributing a significant portion of that to an unnamed private company. Sources familiar with the matter confirmed that the company in question is Anthropic, though they requested anonymity because the details aren’t public. Meanwhile, Amazon’s third-quarter profit surged 38%, helped by a $9.5 billion pretax gain tied to the rising valuation of its Anthropic investment. The tech giant noted that this increase appeared in its nonoperating income for the period, according to Thursday’s earnings release.

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These updates mark a new phase in how big tech’s AI bets are starting to materialize on paper. What began as strategic plays in generative AI startups is now contributing real albeit unrealized gains to some of the world’s most powerful corporations. While these profits remain largely “on paper,” they reflect how quickly the financial impact of the AI boom is moving from theory to balance sheet.

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Neither Alphabet nor Anthropic commented on the valuation changes.

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In September, Anthropic completed a massive $13 billion funding round, nearly tripling its valuation to $183 billion. Under accounting rules, companies must regularly update the reported value of their private investments to reflect changes in market price per share, even if they haven’t sold or directly profited from the stake yet.

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This isn’t the first time Alphabet’s bottom line has benefited from private-company investments. Back in April, Alphabet’s first-quarter results got an $8 billion boost from unrealized gains on another private investment later revealed to be Elon Musk’s SpaceX.

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Not every tech giant has been as fortunate. Microsoft Corp. reported that its most recent quarterly net income fell by $3.1 billion, reflecting losses tied to its investment in OpenAI. The company has invested roughly $13.75 billion in the ChatGPT creator and holds a 27% ownership stake.

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Alphabet’s involvement with Anthropic continues to deepen. Google has poured around $3 billion into the AI startup so far including $2 billion in 2023 and another $1 billion earlier this year. Just this month, Google Cloud signed a major deal to provide Anthropic with 1 million specialized AI chips starting in 2026. The agreement, worth tens of billions of dollars, will deliver over a gigawatt of computing power, significantly expanding Anthropic’s capacity for AI model training and development.

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Amazon has been equally aggressive in its support of Anthropic. The e-commerce and cloud computing leader is investing $8 billion into the startup and has already built a vast network of data centers and custom AI chips as part of Project Rainier Amazon’s infrastructure initiative to support advanced AI workloads. According to the company, that system is now fully operational, enabling Anthropic to scale up its next generation of large language models.

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The growing influence of Anthropic on major corporate balance sheets underscores just how deeply the AI revolution is reshaping financial and technological landscapes. Once viewed as risky moonshots, these investments are now delivering meaningful financial impacts even before the technology’s full commercial potential is realized.

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For investors, the takeaway is clear: the AI ecosystem is becoming a genuine profit driver, not just a futuristic vision. The fact that paper gains from private AI firms are showing up in the earnings of industry leaders like Alphabet and Amazon signals that the sector’s value creation is accelerating faster than many anticipated.

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Still, these windfalls also highlight a potential volatility risk. Because valuations in the private AI market can shift rapidly, the same accounting rules that delivered billion-dollar boosts this quarter could swing in the opposite direction if enthusiasm cools. Yet for now, the AI-fueled momentum behind big tech remains firmly in play.

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With Anthropic’s valuation surging, and both Alphabet and Amazon doubling down on their strategic partnerships, the startup has become a pivotal piece of the broader AI narrative one that’s beginning to reshape not just the tech industry’s future, but also the near-term earnings power of the world’s largest companies.

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In essence, the latest earnings season has revealed something new: AI is no longer just a research frontier it’s becoming a balance sheet powerhouse for big tech.

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