Can someone with familiarity in rounds close to this size speak to their terms?

For instance: i imagine a significant part of this will be “paid” as AWS credits and is not going to be reflected as a balance in a bank account transfer.

Yes, that is the case. It is largely 4B in capex investment, I’d imagine 10% or less is cash. One would think nvidia could get much better terms investing its gpu (assuming they can get it into a working cluster). Instead it’s nvidia gets cash for gpu hardware, that hardware gets put into a data center and AWS invests their hardware as credits for equity instead of cash. And because AWS has already built out their data center infra they can get a better deal than nvidia making the play because nvidia has to rebuild an entire data center infra from scratch (in addition to designing gpu etc).

Now if AWS or gcp can crack gpu compute better than nvidia for training and hosting, then they can basically cut out nvidia and so essentially they get gpu at cost (vs whatever markup they pay to nvidia).

Because essentially whatever return AWS will make from Anthropic will be modulated by the premiums paid to nvidia to invest and also the cost of operating a data center for Anthropic.

But thankfully all of that gets mediated on paper because valuation is more speculative than the returns on nvidia hardware (which will be known to the cent by AWS given its some math of hourly rate and utilization which they have a good idea of)