FILE – The Anthropic website and mobile phone app are shown in this photo, in New York, July 5, 2024. (AP Photo/Richard Drew, File)Anthropic said Friday that its longtime supporter Amazon.com had injected an additional $4 billion into the artificial intelligence startup, doubling its investment in the company known for its chatbot GenAI Claude.
Amazon will maintain its position as a minority investor and will be Anthropic’s primary training partner for AI models, the startup said.
Amazon, which is Anthropic’s main cloud partner, competes fiercely with Microsoft and Alphabet’s Google to offer AI-based tools to its cloud customers.
The e-commerce company’s increased investment in Anthropic highlights the billions of dollars invested in AI startups over the past year, as investors look to profit from the sector’s boom. Generative AI technology, which became popular with the launch of OpenAI’s ChatGPT in late 2022.
Microsoft-backed OpenAI raised $6.6 billion from investors last month, which could value the company at $157 billion and cement its position as one of the world’s most valuable private companies .
Anthropic plans to train and deploy its foundational models on Amazon’s Trainium and Inferentia chips. The intensive process of training AI models requires powerful processors, making securing expensive AI chips a top priority for startups.
Nvidia currently dominates the AI processor market and counts Amazon among its long list of so-called hyperscaler customers.
Nonetheless, Amazon is working on developing its own chips through its Annapurna Labs division, which Anthropic said it “works closely with” to help develop processors.
Britain’s competition regulator said in September that the partnership between Amazon and Anthropic would not be further investigated because it did not fall within its jurisdiction.
Anthropic, co-founded by former OpenAI executives and siblings Dario and Daniela Amodei, said last year it had also secured a $500 million investment from Alphabet, which promised to invest $1.5 billion additional dollars over time.
The startup also uses Alphabet’s Google Cloud services as part of its operations.
