AWS announced a new round of investments in AI startup Anthropic, doubling its investment. previous investment of $4 billion recently approved by a UK regulator.
The company will invest an additional $4 billion in Anthropic, AWS saidand will leverage its partnership with the AI developer through expanded collaboration in the training process.
While the latest investment made AWS Anthropic’s primary cloud provider, this announcement will see AWS also become Anthropic’s primary training partner. Anthropic will use AWS Trainium and Inferentia chips to train and deploy future foundation models.
The move will improve the performance, security and privacy that Amazon Bedrock offers to customers running Anthropic’s Claude models, AWS said.
As an added bonus, both companies will offer AWS customers early access to fine-tuning capabilities with their own data on Anthropic models. This level of customization will be available specifically to AWS customers for a period of time on new Claude models.
“The response from AWS customers developing generative AI applications powered by Anthropic in Amazon Bedrock has been remarkable,” said Matt Garman, CEO of AWS.
“By continuing to deploy Anthropic models in Amazon Bedrock and collaborating with Anthropic on the development of our custom Trainium chips, we will continue to push the boundaries of what customers can achieve with generative AI technologies,” he said. -he declared.
AWS was also impressed by Anthropic’s pace of innovation and its commitment to responsible AI development, the CEO added.
“This has been a year of tremendous growth for Claude, and our collaboration with Amazon has been instrumental in bringing Claude’s capabilities to millions of end users among tens of thousands of customers on Amazon Bedrock,” said Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic.
“We look forward to working with Amazon to train and power our most advanced AI models using AWS Trainium, and help unlock the full potential of their technology,” he added.
AWS going all-in on Anthropic
This latest commitment from AWS brings its total investment in Anthropic to $8 billion, following a $4 billion commitment made in September 2023, which aimed to strengthen the generative AI potential of its core offering.
This was a notable strategic move by AWS at the time, which the company said would help accelerate the development of Anthropic’s future core models and provide access to AWS customers.
However, in August 2024, the UK Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) announced that it would investigate the agreement. The CMA said the investment may require further investigation at the time.
A few months later, the CMA approved the deal, saying Amazon’s partnership with the company was not eligible for investigation under the merger provisions of the UK’s Enterprise Act.
AWS isn’t the only one suing Anthropic. Google parent company Alphabet announced a $2 billion investment in the startup which was investigated then approved by the CMA.
Alphabet previously committed an additional $300 billion to Anthropic in exchange for a 10% stake, according to report of the Financial Times.
Microsoft’s AI spending spree
AWS and Google’s initial support for Anthropic came at a time when both were catching up to Microsoft in the generative AI race. Both tech giants seemed to view Anthropic as the champion they needed in the industry, similar to the close relationship between Microsoft and OpenAI.
Microsoft’s investment in OpenAI in recent years has been significant. As of January 2024, the tech giant had pledged more than $13 billion in support to the startup, and Of this total, $10 billion has been invested in 2023 alone..
The close ties between the two companies, however, have also sparked regulatory scrutiny. The UK’s CMA, the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and EU regulators have all launched investigations into the extent of the companies’ relationships.