Amazon Pumps Another $2.75 Billion Into Anthropic

Amazon continues its heavy AI investment, after the e-commerce giant confirmed billions of dollars of funding for OpenAI competitor Anthropic.

Amazon announced on Wednesday that is pouring an additional $2.75 billion into San Francisco-based Anthropic, which was founded by former OpenAI executives and makes a chatbot called Claude that competes with ChatGPT.

It was in September 2023 that Amazon made an initial investment of $1.25 billion in Anthropic, but also stated it had plans to invest up to $4 billion.

Funding, collaboration

Now Amazon said it has concluded its $4 billion investment in Anthropic, and it will maintain a minority stake in the firm.

Amazon said that the work it and Anthropic are doing together to bring the most advanced generative artificial intelligence (generative AI) technologies to customers worldwide, is only beginning.

As part of a strategic collaborative agreement, Amazon and Anthropic announced that Anthropic is using Amazon Web Services (AWS) as its primary cloud provider for mission critical workloads, including safety research and future foundation model development.

In addition, Anthropic will use AWS Trainium and Inferentia chips to build, train, and deploy its future models and will provide AWS customers around the world with access to future generations of its foundation models on Amazon Bedrock, AWS’s fully managed AI service.

“We have a notable history with Anthropic, together helping organisations of all sizes around the world to deploy advanced generative artificial intelligence applications across their organisations,” said Dr. Swami Sivasubramanian, vice president of Data and AI at AWS.

“Anthropic’s visionary work with generative AI, most recently the introduction of its state-of-the art Claude 3 family of models, combined with Amazon’s best-in-class infrastructure like AWS Tranium and managed services like Amazon Bedrock further unlocks exciting opportunities for customers to quickly, securely, and responsibly innovate with generative AI,” said Dr. Sivasubramanian.

Google investment

“Generative AI is poised to be the most transformational technology of our time, and we believe our strategic collaboration with Anthropic will further improve our customers’ experiences, and look forward to what’s next,” Dr. Sivasubramanian concluded.

Amazon is not the only big name tech firm to invest in Anthropic.

In February 2023 Google was reported to have invested about $300 million in Anthropic