Amazon Invests $4B to Advance Generative AI Tech to Customers

Amazon has increased its investment in Anthropic, adding another $2.75 billion to strengthen ties with the large language model development company.

Amazon took a minority share in the startup last September and has now added to its initial $1.25 billion investment, bringing its total investment in the AI startup to $4 billion.

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

“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.”

Amazon describes its Anthropic ties as a “strategic collaboration” — a description similar to how Microsoft bills its partnership with rival OpenAI.

Anthropic uses AWS as its main cloud provider in return for providing exclusive access to their models.

Anthropic is also using Amazon hardware to train its AI models instead of industry-standard chips from Nvidia. The startup is using AWS Trainium and Inferentia chips to build its Claude models. The startup can provide input on the hardware which Amazon said helps inform future approaches to AI workloads.

Related:Anthropic Unveils Business Friendly Claude 3 AI Models

Anthropic released its Claude 3 family of models in March, which are competitive with top AI models including GPT-4 and Gemini Ultra. They can be used by businesses via Bedrock, Amazon’s fully managed service that makes foundation models available to clients through an API.

Delta Airlines, GoDaddy and Siemens are some of the global organizations are already using Anthropic’s models via Bedrock. Accenture has also teamed with AWS and Anthropic to help companies bring generative AI ideas to production.

Amazon’s increased investment in Anthropic comes as the startup’s stock continues to rise.

Anthropic was founded by former OpenAI engineers. The startup would go on to raise millions of dollars from companies including Zoom, Google and Salesforce and was invited to be among the first batch of AI companies that agreed to the White House AI pledge.