Amazon is investing $25 billion into Anthropic, signaling a major push into artificial intelligence and intensifying competition with other tech giants in the race to dominate the generative AI market. Both companies have been working together since 2023 to accelerate the adoption of generative AI (Gen AI) across industries, making it easier for customers to build, deploy, and scale the technology.
Amazon is investing up to US$25 billion in Anthropic, as the AI startup seeks to spend more than $100 billion on Amazon Web Services (AWS) over the next 10 years. The money Amazon has agreed to pour into Anthropic is on top of the $8 billion it has already invested, the technology giant said.
“Our custom AI silicon offers high performance at significantly lower cost for customers, which is why it’s in such hot demand,” said Andy Jassy, CEO of Amazon.
Part of the new agreement will include current and future generations of Trainium, Amazon’s custom AI chips. Anthropic has confirmed it has secured up to 5 gigawatts of capacity to train and deploy its Claude AI models.
Anthropic is already using AWS Trainium and Graviton to deliver high performance and cost efficiency across Gen AI workloads. Amazon said it was allowing Anthropic to accelerate its growth with “the scale, cost-efficiency and security of AWS”.
Jassy added: “Anthropic’s commitment to run its large language models on AWS Trainium for the next decade reflects the progress we’ve made together on custom silicon, as we continue delivering the technology and infrastructure our customers need to build with Gen AI.”
Amazon added that it would be collaborating with Anthropic on Project Rainier, its $11 billion AWS AI infrastructure initiative in Indiana. It features one of the world’s largest AI compute clusters designed for training Anthropic’s Claude models.
“Our users tell us Claude is increasingly essential to how they work, and we need to build the infrastructure to keep pace with rapidly growing demand,” commented Dario Amodei, CEO and co-founder of Anthropic. “Our collaboration with Amazon will allow us to continue advancing AI research while delivering Claude to our customers, including the more than 100,000 building on AWS.”
Also Read: Anthropic Launches Claude Design io to Simplify Visual Creation With AI
The extended partnership with Amazon comes shortly after Anthropic announced Project Glasswing, a collaboration with companies such as Cisco and Nvidia to harness its Mythos Preview model to detect cyber vulnerabilities online.
Amazon has been investing heavily in AI infrastructure as of late, contributing $50bn to a recent OpenAI funding round. As part of the round, Nvidia and SoftBank invested $30bn each. The investment brought OpenAI from a $500bn valuation to a $730bn pre-money valuation. OpenAI also has an additional deal with Amazon in which the organization will utilize 2GW of computing capacity powered by Amazon’s in-house Trainium chips.
Claude is one of the most popular model families on Amazon Bedrock currently, with more than 100,000 customers running the AI model family on AWS. Anthropic was founded by former OpenAI employees in 2021 and has since become a strong AI business, best known for its Claude AI models. Its annualized revenue has risen above $30 billion, according to CNBC.