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Amazon’s AI spending problem may have a demand answer.

The company’s cloud backlog — future business Amazon has already contracted but has not yet turned into revenue — jumped to $364 billion in the first quarter, CEO Andy Jassy said on the company’s earnings call.

And that figure doesn’t include Amazon’s recently announced Anthropic deal for more than $100 billion.

That’s the key counterpoint to the cash-flow pressure that showed up in Amazon’s first quarter results. The company is spending heavily on data centers, chips, servers, and other infrastructure before it can collect the revenue from that capacity.

Jassy made that timing gap explicit on the earnings call, saying AWS has to lay out cash for “land, power, buildings, chips, servers, and networking gear” before it can monetize that spending. “Typically six to 24 months before we start [billing] customers,” he said.

But he also pushed back on the idea that Amazon is building without visibility.

The $364 billion backlog — reported by Amazon as a “remaining performance obligations” — excludes the recently announced Anthropic deal for more than $100 billion, Jassy said, adding that there is “reasonable breadth” in the backlog and that it is “not just one customer or two customers.”

That makes backlog the number to watch after Amazon’s earnings. If those contracts turn into revenue fast enough, the AI spending boom looks like a growth investment. If they don’t, investors are left staring at the cash drain.