Anthropic announced Friday that longtime backer Amazon has poured an additional $4 billion into the artificial intelligence startup, doubling its investment in the company known for its GenAI chatbot Claude.
Amazon will remain a minority investor and will be a key training partner for Anthropic's AI models, the company said.
Amazon, Anthropic's primary cloud partner, competes fiercely with Microsoft and Alphabet's Google to provide AI-powered tools for cloud customers.
The increased investment in e-commerce company Anthropic comes as investors look to capitalize on the boom in generative AI technology that became popular with the launch of OpenAI's ChatGPT in late 2022, with billions of dollars invested in AI over the past year. It highlights the amount of effort put into the startup.
Microsoft-backed OpenAI raised $6.6 billion from investors last month, valuing the company at $157 billion and potentially solidifying its position as one of the world's most valuable private companies. There is sex.
Anthropic plans to train and deploy its underlying 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.
Still, Amazon is working on developing its own chips through its Annapurna Laboratories division, and Anthropic said it is “working closely” with Annapurna Laboratories to help develop its processors.
Britain's competition regulator said in September that the Amazon-Anthropic partnership was not under its jurisdiction and would not be referred for a deeper investigation.
Anthropic, co-founded by former OpenAI executives and brothers Dario and Daniela Amodei, announced last year that it had secured a $500 million investment from Alphabet and pledged to invest an additional $1.5 billion over the long term.
The startup also uses Alphabet's Google Cloud services as part of its operations.
