Amazon Boosts AI Focus With $4 Billion Anthropic Investment

Amazon plans to invest up to $4 billion in artificial intelligence (AI) firm Anthropic.

The investment, announced Monday (Sept. 25), is part of a larger collaboration between the companies and marks the latest move by a tech giant to carve out a piece of the AI space.

The partnership will see Anthropic use Trainium and Inferential chips from Amazon Web Services (AWS) to “build, train, and deploy its future foundation models, benefitting from the price, performance, scale and security of AWS,” Amazon said in a news release, with the companies also working together develop further Trainium and Inferential technology.

In addition, AWS will become Antrhopic’s primary cloud provider for “mission-critical workloads,” with the AI company planning to run a majority of its workloads on AWS.

And Anthropic has committed to offering AWS customers “access to future generations of its foundation models” via Amazon Bedrock, a fully managed service from AWS introduced by the company in April.

In an interview with Reuters Monday, the CEOs of the two companies said the $4 billion investment will be broken down into an initial $1.25 billion, with either company having the option to inject the additional $2.75 billion.

Amazon’s investment follows those of its cloud rivals Microsoft — which has a $10 billion investment in ChatGPT maker OpenAI — and Google, which has also invested in Anthropic, maker of its own large language model, Claude 2. 

That deal will continue in spite of Anthropic’s new relationship with Amazon, Reuters reported. Still, that report also notes that the new arrangement helps boost Amazon Bedrock, which — per previous reports — had attracted thousands of users three months into its launch.

An Amazon artificial intelligence (AI) service that was announced in April is reportedly being tried by thousands of users.

Companies Sony, Ryanair and Sun Life have come on board with Amazon Bedrock, AWS Vice President of Database, Analytics and Machine Learning Swami Sivasubramanian told Reuters at the time.

“Our mission is to make every company an AI company,” Sivasubramanian said.

With the new partnership, Amazon’s customers will get early access to features from Anthropic, such as the ability to customize their AI. 

AWS CEO Adam Selipsky said, “both companies are committing that, for many years to come, future versions of Claude will be available on Amazon Bedrock, and that’s important.”