Amazon Expands Investment in AI Firm Anthropic to $4 Billion

Amazon made an additional $2.75 billion investment in Anthropic, bringing its total investment in the artificial intelligence company to $4 billion.

The new investment joins the initial investment of $1.25 billion that Amazon made in September and completes the commitment the company promised at that time to invest up to $4 billion, according to a Wednesday (March 27) press release.

“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,” Dr. Swami Sivasubramanian, vice president of data and AI at Amazon Web Services (AWS), said in the release.

As part of the two companies’ agreement, Anthropic is using AWS as its primary cloud provider, according to the release.

In addition, Anthropic will use AWS Tranium and Inferentia chips for its future AI models and has made a long-term commitment to provide AWS customers with access to future generations of its foundation models on AWS’ fully managed service, Amazon Bedrock, the release said.

Anthropic’s most powerful AI models — the Claude 3 family of models — are accessible on Amazon Bedrock. These models “demonstrate advanced intelligence, near-human levels of responsiveness, improved steerability and accuracy, and new vision capabilities,” the release said.

“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,” Sivasubramanian said in the release.

When announcing Amazon’s initial investment in Anthropic in September, the companies said it would be part of a larger collaboration between them.

While substantial, Amazon’s $4 billion investment pales in comparison to the more than $10 billion that Microsoft has invested in OpenAI, the AI startup and maker of the ChatGPT and Dall-E AI products, PYMNTS reported at the time.

Incumbent tech giants like Amazon, Microsoft, Google and others have been partnering with, and investing in, today’s leading AI startups to provide them with the computing power and cash necessary to power and train their foundational models.

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