Amazon announced that it has invested an additional $4 billion in the AI startup Anthropic, ramping up its total investment to $8 billion. The latest round of backing highlights the e-commerce giant’s aim of being one of the main forces behind the AI industry’s explosive growth.
Anthropic is a company based in San Francisco that was started in 2021 by seven people who previously worked at OpenAI. The startup is known for creating its large language model (LLM) called Claude, which competes with similar tools like ChatGPT from OpenAI and Gemini from Google.
Even as a minority stakeholder, Amazon will become even more integral to Anthropic’s operations. As part of this new phase of collaboration, Anthropic will use Amazon Web Services (AWS) as its main cloud and training provider through Amazon Bedrock. The company said it will also use AWS’s Trainium and Inferentia chips to train and deploy future AI models, allowing it to process large amounts of data efficiently.
It’s easy to see why Amazon sees potential. Claude has already proven itself as an essential tool for businesses and governments wanting to scale AI. Pharmaceutical companies are using Claude for drug research and delivery, Perplexity, an AI search engine, relies on Claude models for its search capabilities, and the European Parliament uses the technology to power its ‘Archibot’ AI assistant.
Matt Garman, AWS CEO, said in an Amazon news release: “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.”
AI is expected to eventually offer incredible returns
With the AI sector forecast to generate more than $1 trillion within the next 10 years, other competitors to Amazon in big tech like Google, Microsoft, and Meta have also been pouring billions to claim their share of the market.
Google, which has spent hundreds of millions training and developing its own in-house AI model Gemini, has also invested in Anthropic. To date, it has invested $500 million in the startup, with plans to invest an additional $1.5 billion.
Microsoft has invested almost $14 billion in Anthropic competitor OpenAI, while Meta CEO Mark Zuckerburg told analysts on a call last month that Meta’s “AI investments continue to require serious infrastructure,” adding that he expects “to continue investing significantly there [in AI] too.”
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