Amazon ups investment in AI firm Anthropic to $4 billion

Amazon has announced an additional $2.75 billion in investment for the AI company Anthropic. This builds on top of a previous $1.25 billion investment last year meaning that the total invested has now risen to $4 billion.

As part of the deal for the money, Amazon has been given a minority stake in Anthropic allowing it to help guide the company’s direction. It is also able to offer Anthropic’s models on Amazon Bedrock, an AWS fully-managed service that allows developers to build generative AI features into their apps and services.

Another important aspect of the agreement is that Anthropic will train and deploy its models on the AWS Cloud using Trainium and Inferentia chips. It will also work with Amazon on the future development of Trainium and Inferentia technology.

For a bit of background, Amazon has taken note of how power-hungry generative AI is and has developed these two technologies as a result. With the Trainium purpose-built chip, Amazon delivers up to 50% cost-to-train saving over comparable Amazon EC2 instances. The Inferentia chip enables models to generate inferences faster and at a lower cost with up to 40% better price performance.

Commenting on the news, Dr Swami Sivasubramanian, vice president of Data and AI at AWS, said:

“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.

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.”

The tighter collaboration between Anthropic and Amazon will allow the AI startup to continue its work in more security. One of main issues for these new AI startups is funding and resources and we’ve seen many of them come to the bigger players like Microsoft and Amazon to get on a more sustainable path.

Source: Amazon