Amazon has (once again) invested in AI startup Anthropic. The e-commerce giant announced that it is making an additional $4 billion investment in the San Francisco-based AI startup, bringing Amazon’s total investment in Anthropic to $8 billion (even though Amazon retains its status as a minority investor). Earlier, Amazon had pumped in $2.75 billion in Anthropic (in March) and $1.25 billion in September 2023.
“Amazon has (once again) invested in AI startup Anthropic. The e-commerce giant announced that it is making an additional $4 billion investment in the San Francisco-based AI startup, bringing Amazon’s total investment in Anthropic to $8 billion (even though Amazon retains its status as a minority investor),” Amazon noted in an official statement.
“Last September, Amazon and Anthropic announced a strategic collaboration, which included Anthropic naming Amazon Web Services (AWS) its primary cloud provider and Amazon making a $4 billion investment in Anthropic. That announcement was underpinned by the rapid adoption of the Claude family of models on AWS, following its addition to Amazon Bedrock in April of last year. Today, Amazon and Anthropic are deepening their collaboration,” the company added.
As part of the deal, Anthropic has committed to making AWS its primary cloud platform for training and deploying its generative AI models. In addition to this, the Claude chatbot maker will also collaborate with Annapurna Labs, AWS’s chipmaking subsidiary, to develop future iterations of AWS’s Trainium accelerators, custom-designed chips optimized for AI training. According to Anthropic, its engineers are working closely with Annapurna Labs to maximize computational efficiency, leveraging these advancements to enhance the performance of its AI systems.
This new investment comes on the heels of Claude – Anthropic’s flagship AI product and competitor to OpenAI’s ChatGPT – gaining considerable traction among businesses. The Claude series now includes its latest versions like Claude 3 and Claude 3.5 Sonnet, and the chatbot has become accessible to thousands of companies thanks to AWS’s Amazon Bedrock platform, enabling enterprises to integrate the chatbot’s capabilities into their workflows. This includes the likes of Pfizer, Intuit, and more. In fact, AWS customers are offered exclusive customization options (for example, they will be able to fine-tune Claude models using proprietary data). According to reports, Claude will also power Amazon’s new and revamped Alexa voice assistant.
“The response from AWS customers who are developing generative AI applications powered by Anthropic in Amazon Bedrock has been remarkable,” Matt Garman, AWS CEO, commented on the matter. “By continuing to deploy Anthropic models in Amazon Bedrock and collaborating with Anthropic on the development of our custom Trainium chips, we’ll keep pushing the boundaries of what customers can achieve with generative AI technologies. We’ve been impressed by Anthropic’s pace of innovation and commitment to responsible development of generative AI, and look forward to deepening our collaboration.”
